The Burden of Time

I had done a writer's workshop with Gordon Lish, the notorious creative writing teacher at one point many years earlier. But I'd never actually written. And I think to a great extent, the reason Kitchen Confidential sounds like it does is I just did not have the luxury or the burden of a lot of time to sit around and contemplate the mysteries of the universe. I had to wake up at 5 o'clock in the morning, write for an hour and a half, and then I had to go to work to a real job. So here I was. It was liberating in the sense that I had no time to think about what I was writing. And I certainly had no customer or reader in mind because I was quite sure no one would ever read it. That was, in many ways, a very liberating place to be. And I've kind of tried to stick with that business model since.

ANTHONY BOURDAIN