“As a teacher I realize that what one learns in school doesn't serve for very much at all, that the only thing one can really learn is self-understanding, and this is something that can't be taught.”

“As a very young girl, I understood that the interior activities of the home are as significant as the exterior activities of society.”

“Cooking is one of the strongest ceremonies for life. When recipes are put together, the kitchen is a chemical laboratory involving air, fire, water and the earth. This is what gives value to humans and elevates their spiritual qualities. If you take a frozen box and stick it in the microwave, you become connected to the factory.”

“Everyone's past is locked up in their recipes - the past of an individual and the past of a nation as well.”

“For me, love is the most important force. It moves the universe.”

“I acknowledge the four elements. Water in the North; incense to recognize the air in the East; flowers for the earth in the South; a candle for light from the West. It helps me keep perspective.”

“I believe very much in sensual powers as a means of obtaining understanding.”

“I can't speak for readers in general, but personally I like to read stories behind which there is some truth, something real and above all, something emotional. I don't like to read essays on literature; I don't like to read critical or rational or impersonal or cold disquisitions on subjects.”

“I grew up in a modern home, but my grandmother lived across the street in an old house that was built when churches were illegal in Mexico. She had a chapel in the home, right between the kitchen and dining room.”

“I started knitting in the Congress, and it was a scandal - like, big scandal.”

“I was pretty much a hippie. I was a vegetarian, gypsy-like. I liked to meditate, and it's curious because I was very much attracted to the possibility of change.”

“I watch cooking change the cook, just as it transforms the food.”

“In film you can use images exclusively and narrate a whole story very quickly, but you don't always so easily find the form in cinema to dig deeper into human thoughts and emotions. And in a novel you can much more easily express a character's inner thoughts and feelings.”

“It wasn't books that inspired me to write. For me, inspiration was simple, immediate: I got it from eating, dancing, talking. I got it from life lived, things touched, from sensuality, from love of life, from our irrefutable connection to the earth.”

“Progress makes us lose the feeling of a ceremony that cooking should have. It has significantly shifted our values so that now it seems to us that only activities with an economic reward are worth pursuing.”

“Technology and industry have distanced people from nature and magic and human values.”

“The culinary tradition in my family is very strong. My mother, a very wise woman, spent the better part of her life in a kitchen. It's a very strong part of her identity. I grew up there next to the fire.”

“The only way to find peace is when you are not separated, when you are not fighting, when you part of the whole.”

“The only way we'll know where we're going is to look at the past and to remember who we were through ceremonies and rituals.”

“The same way one tells a recipe, one tells a family history. Each one of us has our past locked inside.”

“There are still some natural forces that everybody understands. Technology and industry have distanced people from nature and magic and human values.”

“We must adjust our value systems and work to modify today's societies, in which economic interests are carried to the extreme and irrationally produce not merely objects, but weapons of war. These societies don't care about the destruction of the planet and mankind as long as they earn profits - it can't go on like this.”

“We're in a period of revolutionary change. I'm optimistic. One's self changes, and then the world changes. It's going to begin internally, not externally.”

“What has never changed, what is always present and what is, in the end, what sustains us is that energy that I talk about in 'Like Water for Chocolate...' that loving energy. Without that, I wouldn't have had the strength to keep going and enjoy life.”

“What I find sad is that the New Age movement is primarily a commercial undertaking. But it is answering to a human need.”

“What others call magic realism is normal and an everyday thing to me.”