Tom Junod Quotes

Tom Junod

Profession : Journalist

Birth : April 9, 1958

You don't have to love cooking to cook, but you have to do more than love baking to bake. You have to bake out of love.

Tom Junod

We live in a time of short attention spans and long stories. The short attention spans are seen as inevitable, the consequence of living our lives in thrall to flickering streams of information. The long stories are the surprise, as is the persistence of the audience for them.

Tom Junod

Wearing a suit can seem like a somewhat archaic gesture, a concession to formality in a determinedly casual age.

Tom Junod

I met fred rogers in 1998, when 'Esquire' assigned me a story about him for a special issue on American heroes. I last spoke with him on Christmas Day 2002, when I called him to talk about an argument I'd had with my cousin; he died two months later, on February 27, 2003.

Tom Junod

Gluttony is harder than it looks. It's listed as a sin, as something you give in to, when really it's a skill, requiring not just hunger but resilience. That's why the most resilient city in the country, New Orleans, is also the most gluttonous.

Tom Junod

Once upon a time, a long time ago, a man took off his jacket and put on a sweater. Then he took off his shoes and put on a pair of sneakers. His name was Fred Rogers.

Tom Junod

Once upon a time, there was a boy who didn't like himself very much. It was not his fault. He was born with cerebral palsy. Cerebral palsy is something that happens to the brain. It means that you can think but sometimes can't walk, or even talk.

Tom Junod

His name was Fred Rogers. He came home to Latrobe, Pennsylvania, once upon a time, and his parents, because they were wealthy, had bought something new for the corner room of their big redbrick house. It was a television.

Tom Junod

I did not get into a fistfight with my father at my sister's wedding. My sister didn't have a wedding.

Tom Junod

But stories don't only speak; they are spoken to, by the circumstances under which they are written.

Tom Junod

Fred Rogers was a children's-TV host, but he was not Captain Kangaroo or Officer Joe Bolton. He was an ordained Presbyterian minister who was so appalled by what he saw on 1950s television--adults trying to entertain children by throwing pies in each other's faces - that he joined the medium as a reformer.

Tom Junod

I was a salesman just out of college, traveling all over American roads in the cause of selling handbags to stores that would in turn sell them to American women, not unlike my father had done.

Tom Junod

I had heard a lot of stories about my father and celebrities, most of them from his own mouth. In his stories, famous women flirted with him outrageously and helplessly, and famous men sought his company, paid him deference, or took umbrage after being upstaged by him.

Tom Junod

I didn't love David Bowie. Sure, I loved a lot of his songs, like everybody else, and, like everybody else, I had an incarnation of Bowie that I loved best - in my case, the solemn 'art-rock' Bowie of the late Seventies.

Tom Junod

I love many of the rock and rollers next up on altar of actuarial sacrifice more than I ever loved David Bowie.

Tom Junod

Now, I love Israeli food, love 'Jerusalem: A Cookbook', love the homey exoticism, the fusion forged in the crucible of an eternally contested crossroads.

Tom Junod

For a long time, New Orleans was the classic-rock station of American cuisine, its reputation for flamboyance belying its playlist conservatism.

Tom Junod

One of the great pleasures of reading Tom Wolfe - of still reading Tom Wolfe - is the sense of awe he consistently inspires.

Tom Junod

There is certainly no want of journalistic ambition among the purveyors of what is now called 'long-form,' nor of novelistic technique brought to bear on nonfiction, nor of outrage.

Tom Junod

We are trained to distinguish between journalism that's short and long, that's responsible and irresponsible, that stands for the right values and stands for the wrong.

Tom Junod