Dinner Party Quotes

#1. If George W. Bush is the kind of person folks might like to have a beer with, John McCain is the guy you pray you don't get seated next to at a dinner party.

Ellen Malcolm

#2. I find my characters and stories in many varied places; sometimes they pop out of newspaper articles, obscure historical texts, lively dinner party conversations and some even crawl out of the dusty remote recesses of my imagination.

Lynn Nottage

#3. Misery loves company which is ironic because it rarely throws dinner parties.

Dov Davidoff

#4. I think middle age begins once you start looking forward to eating dinner before six thirty, or when you call the cops when your next-door neighbor has a party.

Amy Poehler

#5. You wear your armor even to dinner, Lady Wilhelmina?"
"Of course I wear armor. I am sitting with a pirate, a mercenary, an adventurer, and a bounder. If a shot is not fired tonight, I daresay that your reputations are nothing but lies.

Meljean Brook

#6. In terms of 'Solaris,' I didn't really think about the religious aspect an awful lot. There's one scene at a dinner party, and it's discussed, but it wasn't an overwhelming theme for me.

Natascha McElhone

#7. With whiskey, the capillary bloom was more diffusely rosy than with gin and less purple than with wine. Every university dinner party was a study in blooms.

Jonathan Franzen

#8. One should not chug an entire glass of wine at an elegant dinner party. I start hacking and coughing, having practically water-boarded myself out of sheer humiliation.

Lisa Daily

#9. I remember saying things, but I have no idea what was said. It was generally a friendly conversation. - Associated Press reporter Jack Sullivan, attempting to recount a 3 A.M. exchange we had at a dinner party and inadvertently describing the past ten years of my life.

Chuck Klosterman

#10. All of our panelists are deeply engaged in the topics at hand, so that leaves me free to convene a little dinner party, sans alcohol, and invite the rest of America to listen in.

Gwen Ifill

#11. In any restaurant, my eyes alight first, as if by an atavistic pull, on the meat dishes on the menu. In any dinner party I throw, I think of the non-vegetarian dish as central. I view this as a combination of weakness, greed and moral failure. Someone please help.

Neel Mukherjee

#12. Think beyond the vase! If you have a vase of flowers on a dining table for a quick dinner party, think about scattering flower petals, leaves, or even fruit along the tabletop.

Clinton Smith

#13. You've got to have the right attire for the right event. I attend a lot of dinners, a lot of concerts, and I have to be on the red carpet; each has its own dress code, and I have to be prepared. Jeans and a hoodie are great for a concert, but a dinner party?

Amar'e Stoudemire

#14. I'm a really good dinner party guest. I am always so appreciative, impressed that anyone has even managed to turn on the oven and cook for me.

Lucy Punch

#15. It's as though some poor devil were to set out for a large dinner party with the knowledge that the following morning he would be hearing exactly what each of the other guests thought of him.

Cornelia Otis Skinner

#16. MY TOUGHEST MATCH; is not on the mat. It's at the dinner table and it's at fast food restaurants. It's hearing about the party I can Never go to. It's realizing being a Great Wrestler isn't a sport, It's a LIFE.

Stephen Neal

#17. I first saw 'The Dinner Party' in 2007 at the Brooklyn Museum in New York City. While perusing the Heritage Panels, which honor 999 women who have made important contributions to Western history, I came upon the names of two sisters, Sarah and Angelina Grimke.

Sue Monk Kidd

#18. Food became, for dinner parties in the sixties, what abstract expressionism had been in the fifties.

Nora Ephron

#19. You better have some skills in this world. You better bring something to the dinner party or you will be the dinner.

Bryant McGill

#20. The dying process begins the minute we are born, but it accelerates during dinner parties.

Carol Grace

#21. The formal Washington dinner party has all the spontaneity of a Japanese imperial funeral.

Simon Hoggart

#22. A baby changes your dinner party conversation from politics to poops [very pleasant thanks for that mental image Maurice!]

Mo Johnston

#23. New York is like a big dinner party. You have to be very careful about what you say and do because you never know whose feet are touching under the table.

Susanna Moore

#24. We are all Julian Assange. Serious reporters discuss classified information every day - go to any Washington or New York dinner party where real journalists are present, and you will hear discussion of leaked or classified information. That is journalists' job in a free society.

Naomi Wolf

#25. While overseeing tonight's dinner party, I finally found myself in the presence of Mr. Edwards's famed wit when he asked me whether I had visited the zoo to see the puffins. Somehow Miss Wyndham was the one forced to leave the house.

Tarun Shanker

#26. A guest at a dinner party observed the strange expression on James Thurber's face. 'Don't be concerned,' said Thurber's wife. 'He's writing.'

Sophy Burnham

#27. If people are asking me for clubbing tips, then they're in real trouble. My clubbing tip is never go to a club, because they're horrible and I hate them. I'm more of a dinner party guy.

Simon Bird

#28. My husband, Gabriele, is a musician, and I love music, so you can bet it's a really important part of our home entertaining repertoire, even if it means Gabriele making a really good playlist for a dinner party.

Debi Mazar

#29. and a barge that sailed into the banqueting-hall with his week's washing, just as he was giving a dinner-party; and he was

Kenneth Grahame

#30. First base was a far richer social opportunity. First base made catching feeling like a bad dinner party - what with the ump hanging on your shoulder and all the fans and cameras staring at you. At first base you could really talk.

Michael Lewis

#31. I've never been to a dinner party where everyone at the dinner table didn't say something funny.

Lorrie Moore

#32. It is very vulgar to talk about one's own business. Only people like stockbrokers do that, and then only at dinner parties.

Oscar Wilde

#33. Telling people at a dinner party you drive a Nissan Almera is like telling them you've got the Ebola virus and you're about to sneeze.

Jeremy Clarkson

#34. The perfect party for me is having six to 12 people for dinner Friday or Saturday - good, fun friends, a lot of artists. I have a beautiful deck that looks over the canyon and Los Angeles on one side, so it's very pretty at night. It's a great opportunity to catch up with friends.

Sofia Milos

#35. At your next dinner party, try playing the following game. Challenge everyone around the table to produce a single drug that can cure people of an illness, other then antibiotics. If you come up with anything, stop whatever you are doing and call me.

Lynne McTaggart

#36. When I would see my friends with their kids, I was envious that you can use children to get out of just about anything. If you don't feel like going to a dinner party, you could say, 'My kid's sick. I can't make it.' Who's gonna argue with you?

Kevin Nealon

#37. Thom is one of those wonderful people to cook for because he absolutely loves it, just loves it. He loves to eat and drink and he'd be a great guest at any dinner party.

Ted Allen

#38. When we're discussing who to invite to a dinner party, my wife Chaz and I sometimes use the shorthand, 'good value for money,' which indicates guests expected to be entertaining.

Roger Ebert

#39. Nothing says 'classy' like posting bond for your girlfriend so you can escort her to a black-tie dinner.

Linda Morris

#40. I would show up at a party for Al Qaeda if you said there's going to be a dinner.

Gilbert Gottfried

#41. That which chiefly causes the failure of a dinner-party, is the running short
not of meat, nor yet of drink, but of conversation.

Lewis Carroll

#42. I don't like crowds because I am small and fear being trampled. My ideal night out is a dinner party in my backyard with a group of like-minded friends whom I boss around in a gentle and loving way.

Amy Poehler

#43. I'm with you, networking is miserable. Whenever I find myself at a dinner party where people are networking I immediately focus on the dog, and if the host doesn't have one, I focus on persuading them to get a dog.

Jon Acuff

#44. people are taking a bottle of wine to a dinner party or for a gift, they'll often settle on Chardonnay.

James Waldorf

#45. I try to greet my friends with a drink in my hand, a warm smile on my face, and great music in the background, because that's what gets a dinner party off to a fun start.

Ina Garten

#46. A photographer went to a socialite party in New York. As he entered the front door, the host said 'I love your pictures - they're wonderful; you must have a fantastic camera.' He said nothing until dinner was finished, then: 'That was a wonderful dinner; you must have a terrific stove.

Sam Haskins

#47. I have two choices: attend my sister's dinner party or tie a plastic sack around my mother's head until she runs out of ngagging. I choose the evil that doesn't come witha felony conviction.

Alex Adams

#48. When entertaining a party of six or more always use place cards. When guests know where they are sitting it puts them at ease immediately and they are assured you have given thoughtful consideration as to who their dinner partner will be.

Annie Falk

#49. All through that winter and into the spring, when our Tuesday and Thursday-night dinner shifts were done, Matt and I would sit at the long table near the salad bar and plan his end-of-the-year party, our voices echoing importantly in the cavernous wood-panelled dining hall.

Tom Perrotta

#50. There is etiquette in golf, but it's not any harder to learn than what to do at a dinner party. Actually, it's probably easier. And these days, there are a lot more women out there than there used to be. It's not like when I was young. I was always the only girl on the range.

Paula Creamer

#51. Once you've got a big feminist and political justification for talking about how you went round to Benedict Cumberbatch's house and did period all over his sofa, then there's no reason not to tell that anecdote in the middle of a dinner party.

Caitlin Moran

#52. She remembered something she overheard at a dinner party -- Everyone loses their mind at least once in this lifetime. Everyone.

Lawren Leo

#53. I often feel I'm a disappointment to people because they expect me to be the guy in the books. When I sit next to someone at a dinner party I can see they expect me to be quick and witty, and I'm not at all.

Bill Bryson

#54. If I were invited to a dinner party with my characters, I wouldn't show up.

Dr. Seuss

#55. Is there anything sadder than the scrawniest little piece of uneaten chicken at a dinner party?"
"Hmm," said Jules. "Yes. The Holocaust.

Meg Wolitzer

#56. The half-hour before dinner has always been considered as the great ordeal through which the mistress, in giving a dinner-party, will either pass with flying colours, or lose many of her laurels.

Isabella Beeton

#57. I love kids, but I have to be honest: I am that person at a dinner party who's a little relieved when the kids go to bed.

Jonathan Slavin

#58. I consider a good dinner party at our house to be where people drink and eat more than they're meant to. My husband is a really fantastic cook. His mother is Italian and if you walk into our house, we assume you're starving.

Elizabeth Gilbert

#59. Practical gifts are another great way to be thoughtful, and they work for anything from birthdays to dinner-party gifts.

Phoebe Cates

#60. My girlfriend and I went to a dinner party the other night and we ended up playing charades. There was another couple there that was deaf. They were so good.

Zach Galifianakis

#61. At a dinner party one should eat wisely but not too well, and talk well but not too wisely.

W. Somerset Maugham

#62. Give me a small intimate gathering of five people, a dinner party, where one-on-one conversations can be had, where people talk about current events, good books, good food, and weird news. That was my idea of a good time.

Penny Reid

#63. When we were working on 'Julie & Julia,' I went back to the Julia Child cookbook and made some things I haven't made in a while, one being beef bourguignon, which to me is a hilariously 1960s dish that everyone felt they had to serve at a dinner party or they weren't a grown-up.

Nora Ephron

#64. You know when you tell a self-deprecating story at a dinner party, everyone's laughing along with you? But then when someone else repeats that same story at another dinner party you feel they're all laughing at you?

Toby Young

#65. Whereas Jeremy is just the opposite: always moving because he's never really thinking of anything and the kind of guy you'd worry inviting to a dinner party because he says what he thinks. He can be insulting at times but doesn't mean to be.

Jason Schwartzman

#66. Somewhere in the back of their minds, hosts and guests alike know that the dinner party is a source of untold irritation, and that even the dullest evening spent watching television is preferable.

Craig Brown

#67. I can get a better grasp of what is going on in the world from one good Washington dinner party than from all the background information NBC piles on my desk.

Barbara Walters

#68. Coffee: Induces wit. Good only if it comes through Havre. After a big dinner party it is taken standing up. Take it without sugar - very swank: gives the impression you have lived in the East.

Gustave Flaubert

#69. Dinner-parties bore us because our imagination is absent, and reading interests us because it is keeping us company.

Marcel Proust

#70. Claire lifted her glass after everyone had eaten. "Everyone make a toast. To food and flowers," she said.
"To love and laughter," Tyler said.
"To old and new," Henry said.
"To what's next," Evanelle said.
"To the apple tree," Bay said.

Sarah Addison Allen

#71. I love a small dinner party - let's say six people, max, were everybody's having the same conversation. That's my favorite thing in the world.

Paul F. Tompkins

#72. She had gone to a dinner party in her honor the night before the opening, and everyone had asked, with precisely the same intonation, as though it was a piece of urban Gregorian chant, Where have you been?

Anna Quindlen

#73. A true friend to me is someone that comes over for dinner, and hangs out with my daughter, someone I party with on a regular basis.

Gilbert Melendez

#74. The end of a novel, like the end of children's dinner-party, must be made up of sweetmeats and sugar-plum

Anthony Trollope

#75. Knew, that for a birthday or a holiday or simply a dinner party offering, they could bring her a snow globe. Except that Dorothea was no longer charmed by snow

Anna Quindlen

#76. President Obama hosted a state dinner for British Prime Minister David Cameron. The president and the British are getting along a lot better lately. They love to compare notes on ways the Tea Party's always trying to overthrow their rule in America.

Argus Hamilton

#77. I believe the potluck tradition of entertaining is the equivalent of a teenage boy wanting to have sex with his girlfriend but who is too scared to go to CVS to buy condoms. If you can't handle providing all the courses for your dinner party, you can't handle the hosting duties of a dinner party.

Mindy Kaling

#78. [On the socialites in New York in the Nineties who devoted themselves to politics, charities, and other volunteer work:] I never knew but one woman who devoted her life exclusively to the social game. She ended her days arranging dinner parties with paper dolls, a breakdown pitiful to watch.

Margaret Case Harriman

#79. Remember that you must behave in life as at a dinner party. Is anything brought around to you? Put out your hand and take your share with moderation. Does it pass by you? Don't stop it. Is it not yet come? Don't stretch your desire towards it, but wait till it reaches you.

Epictetus

#80. The day comes in the life of every single man living alone when he must give a dinner party, however unpretentious, and that day had now arrived for Rupert Stonebird.

Barbara Pym

#81. Think of a dinner party as a club of revolutionaries, a technocratic elite whose social interactions that night are a dry run for some future takeover of the state.

Phillip Lopate

#82. There is nothing like roast chicken. It is helpful and agreeable, the perfect dish no matter what the circumstances. Elegant or homey, a dish for a dinner party or a family supper, it will not let you down.

Laurie Colwin

#83. A cocktail party is what you call it when you invite everyone you know to come over to your house at six p.m., put cigarettes out on your rug, and leave at eight to go somewhere more interesting for dinner without inviting you.

P. J. O'Rourke

#84. There are only three things which make life worth living: to be writing a tolerably good book, to be in a dinner party of six, and to be traveling south with someone whom your conscience permits you to love.

Cyril Connolly

#85. I sit at home and read books. I watch movies. I watch television. I go and play golf. I don't go to nightclubs. I don't go out to dinner that often. I'm not a big party guy.

Samuel L. Jackson

#86. Like those dreaded dinner party words 'Longtime Companion' or Partner.' Sometimes I just want to scream, 'is she your wife or is she your mistress? Please clarify the nature of your bloody relationship!

Suzanne Stroh

#87. I would rather be seated between any two women than any two men at a dinner party.

John Updike

#88. I might wear a dinner jacket once a year to our Oscar party - that's a big thing - but I don't go to parties. I'm social but I'm not a socialite person.

Graydon Carter

#89. Hosting is work. It means you don't get to go up to your room and disappear and take a nap. Like everybody else does after lunch. I'm talking about hosting, not hosting a dinner party, but hosting people staying in your home.

George Clooney

#90. 'Dance Dance Revolution.' That's a lot of fun when you're having a dinner party and you just want to be a little silly.

Natalie Martinez

#91. Beautiful speech doesn't need protection, it's ugly speech that needs protection. We have these cultural norms that allow people to say really ugly things. You don't have to invite them to your dinner party, but you should let them say it.

Jeff Bezos

#92. A high-school girl, seated next to a famous astronomer at a dinner party, struck up a conversation with him by asking: "What do you do for a living?" "I study astronomy," he replied. "Really? said the teenager, wide-eyed. "I finished astronomy last year."

James Keller

#93. With four-appetizer, four-entree menus, it's like, give me a break. That's not a restaurant, that's a dinner party.

Joe Bastianich

#94. Why do people who read Shakespeare still spend hours watching shitty TV or staring out of the window or arguing about whose dinner party to go to?

Glen Duncan

#95. It is quite proper to meet a young man at a cocktail party and go on to dinner with him. If he is attractive, you can consider yourself not only correct, but lucky.

Alice-Leone Moats

#96. There is definitely a comeback of the idea of dressing well every day. Nowadays, suits can be worn for many occasions - to work or to school, to a dinner party or red carpet event.

Brunello Cucinelli

#97. Society was nothing but a long, dull dinner party conversation in which one was forced to speak to one's partner on both the left and the right.

Ann Patchett

#98. At a formal dinner party, the person nearest death should always be seated closest to the bathroom.

George Carlin

#99. I was invited to a dinner party by an ex, and I was convinced that he wanted to rekindle our relationship. I prohibited my friends from coming with me because I didn't want to make it awkward for them when he professed his love to me.

Chrissie Fit

#100. I listen to a lot of podcasts, which are split down the middle between comedy and board game podcasts, and a couple of eclectic ones like 'The Dinner Party' from NPR, where they take an event that happened that week in history and give you a cocktail recipe inspired by it.

Rich Sommer