"Speaking in his thick South Florida accent, getting worked up to a full-throated rant, Andre is off on a verbal tear, invoking Jerome, the pain and hardship he had suffered recovering from his broken ankle, fealty to Buddy, what that Emmitt Smith said, how they all knew they could beat New Orleans and Dallas, for that matter, and, besides, nobody deserved to get injured, and even though he was a Christian and didn't hold a grudge against anybody, far from it, and how piss-poor the New Orleans offense was and how good they could play if they just all got on the same page and how... how... they owed it to him, dammit, if they didn't owe it to themselves... all they had been through together... and the greater glory of Jesus... and... can you believe that that Emmitt Smith would say those things?

In general, it's a first-rate, righteous oration, even if it wanders a bit. Some of the guys have a hard time following Andre's eccentric Everglades inflections.

'What's he saying?' a rookie leans over and asks Golic.

'Wants us to win,' Golic whispers back."
- Mark Bowden, Bringing the Heat

"They had enjoyed such moments together, moments sweetened by promise. There were games in which they just caught fire, when offense, defense, and special teams were all clicking at once, when they were capable of crushing anyone. It was when they achieved this synchronicity, with the crowd roaring and every one of them motoring on love, adrenaline, and conviction, when they were riding a mounting spiral of their own momentum, when they were bringing the heat, that the Game became something timeless, pure, and beautiful, something linked to the earliest amateur contests on college greens, something that connected each player with the thrill he felt when he first played as a child, before he knew about playing with pressure and pain."
- Mark Bowden, Bringing the Heat

"With uncommon insight I divined that a picture about Russian Roulette in Vietnam might not go down too well at Disney."
- Michael Deeley, Blade Runners, Deer Hunters, and Blowing the Bloody Doors Off: My Life in Cult Movies

"One of the most dangerous stunts to film was the leap the Minis make between the roofs of two Fiat factory buildings. It was Remy Julienne who insisted that the stunt was feasible, but I wasn't taking any chances. I wanted to see a test done first on the ground. Julienne and his boys practised many times on the flat. We watched keenly, and I was persuaded that they could do the job - but it is a different matter when those engines are revving at eighty feet above ground. Not only was I concerned for the safety of the drivers, I also had my own fate to worry about. I was told that, as the person in charge of the enterprise, I would be the one held liable if there was an accident. I would immediately be nabbed and thrown into a Turin jail if something went wrong. Thus we arranged that there would be a getaway car by the side door of the factory where we were shooting, and a plane fuelled and ready at the airport. If the worst happened, I could argue my case from outside the country rather than from inside an Italian prison cell.

When it came to get the scene before cameras, the emotion on set was so intense that one of the extra Italian cameramen broke down in tears, unable to witness the action. The crew really didn't want to watch the stunt."
- Michael Deeley, on producing The Italian Job, from Blade Runners, Deer Hunters, & Blowing the Bloody Doors Off: My Life in Cult Movies

"It was a lot of stew we were planning on pouring into this thing, and Dimitri was convinced it would crumble at the table mid-meal, boiling hot fish and lavalike veloute rushing onto the laps of the terrified guests. There would be terrible burns involved, he guessed, 'genital scarring... lawsuits... total disgrace.' Dimitri cheered himself up by suggesting that should the unthinkable happen, we were obliged, like Japanese naval officers, to take our own lives. 'Or like Vatel,' he submitted. 'He ran himself on his sword over a late fish delivery. It's the least we could do.' In the end we agreed that should our Coliseum of Seafood Blanquette fall, we'd simply walk quietly out the door and into the bay to drown ourselves."
- Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential

"For Mario's garden party, we spent days together in a walk-in refrigerator, heads filled with accelerants, gluing near-microscopic bits of carved and blanched vegetables onto the sides of roasts and poached fishes and fowls with hot aspic. We must have looked like crazed neurologists, using tweezers, bamboo skewers, and bar straws to cut and affix garnishes, laboring straight through the night. Covered with gelee, sleepless after forty-eight hours in the cooler, we lost all perspective, Dimitri at one point obsessing over a tiny red faux mushroom in one corner of a poached salmon, muttering to himself about the distinctive white dots on the hood of the Amanitra muscara or psilocybin mushroom while he applied dust-sized motes of cooked egg white for 'authenticity.'"
- Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential

"My idols of that time had been, all too predictably, Hunter Thompson, William Burroughs, Iggy Pop, and Bruce Lee; I had had, for some time, a romantic if inaccurate view of myself as some kind of hyperviolent, junkie Byron. My last semester at Vassar, I'd taken to wearing nunchakus in a strap-on holster and carrying around a samurai sword - that should tell you all you need to know."
- Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential