I started with very traditional style sushi and Japanese food, but then I went to Peru when I was young (around 23-24), and that’s where I got my Peruvian influences and ingredients. So when I opened my first restaurant in 1987, it was unique because in Los Angeles [at the time] the Japanese restaurants were very traditional.

Drugs intensify one’s vision of reality. They also allow one’s character to dominate. If you’re bad, you become very bad, and the reverse. I speak here of marijuana, which intensifies one’s sense of personal reality. Heroin, on the other hand, dissolves character.

The idea that some lives matter less is the root of all that is wrong with the world.

I know that I can be perceived as aloof or cold or unemotional. But I had to learn as a young woman to control my emotions. And that's a hard path to walk. Because you need to protect yourself, you ...

For me, nothing’s ever really done. I have to be cut off because I could record infinitely, so usually a record is done when it has to be, with some kind of created deadline. Or if somebody I’m working with says it’s done, that helps, because I’m just so unhinged that I need limitation. You can make a really great record with limitations. Limitations help incubate a specific thing. If you got to do whatever you want for as long as you want, you might not have that kind of magic.