The Dinner 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. On the three pigs he and his wife own: We acquired the pigs last year. My wife was born on a pig farm and has always been very fond of pigs. Of course, they are for eating, which is why they are named Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner. You wouldn't want to eat Rufus, Marcus and Esmeralda.

John Mortimer

#3. 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

#4. I ... can't go to dinner with you on Wednesday."
"It's almost four in the morning, Abby. What's going on?"
"I can't see you at all, actually."
"Abs ... "
"I'm ... pretty sure I'm in love with Travis," I said, bracing for his reaction.

Jamie McGuire

#5. The Lord help us!' he soliloquised in an undertone of peevish displeasure, while relieving me of my horse: looking, meantime, in my face so sourly that I charitably conjectured he must have need of divine aid to digest his dinner, and his pious ejaculation had no reference to my unexpected advent.

Emily Bronte

#6. ( ... ) after an early dinner at The Egg and We, a recently inaugurated and not very successful little restaurant which Pnin frequented from sheer sympathy with failure ( ... )

Vladimir Nabokov

#7. Spending more time with friends and family costs nothing. Nor does walking, cooking, meditating, making love, reading or eating dinner at the table instead of in front of the television. Simply resisting the urge to hurry is free.

Carl Honore

#8. Twitter is a much more dangerous cauldron of groupthink than happy hours or dinners. On Twitter the reward comes from agreeing or loudly disagreeing with the joke, or the "smart take." In person you hash things out.

David Weigel

#9. King Henry VIII, who said to his lawyer, Forget the alimony, I've got a better idea. Never got a dinner!

Red Buttons

#10. THE FIRST PRINCIPLE OF GASTRONOMY
There's a rule for proper doses
in the dinner-eaters lore:
one should stop the filling process
while one still has room for more.
And if someone at the table
had reminded me before -
Hallelujah! I'd be able
to absorb a little more.

Piet Hein

#11. We pray to be conventional. But the wary Heaven takes care you shall not be, if there is anything good in you. Dante was very badcompany, and was never invited to dinner.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#12. When I listen to the complaints that follow just about every presidential debate, I'm reminded of the well-worn joke about the Jewish mother who buys her son two shirts. When he shows up at dinner wearing one, she says: 'What's the matter? You didn't like the other one?'

Jeff Greenfield

#13. Dinner is where the magic happens in the kitchen.

Kris Carr

#14. You want me to invite him to dinner."
"I want you to invite him to dinner," she agreed.
"You know," he said, "most gay men don't have mothers who are this enthusiastic about their love lives."
"That's probably true," she said. "You're one of the lucky ones.

Matthew Haldeman-Time

#15. I don't want you to go, but I can't make you stay. I want to continue holding you in my arms at night when you can't sleep and be there in the morning when you're adjusting to yet another new outfit. I also need someone to burn dinner because that doesn't happen nearly enough for me.

Sydney Landon

#16. If you submit an
article to a major refereed clinical journal and it is accepted
upon first submission without a single revision, let me
know and I will take you to dinner the next time you are in
Portland, Oregon.

Robert B. Taylor

#17. Thus old men are honoured with a particular respect, yet all the rest fare as well as they. Both dinner and supper are begun with some lecture of morality that is read to them; but it is so short that it is not tedious nor uneasy to them to hear it.

Thomas More

#18. I lead a simple life. I feed the fish. I walk the dogs. I cook dinner. Occasionally I take a meeting.

Macaulay Culkin

#19. I never have time to have a dinner. I have to eat while I'm memorizing lines. The only way to maintain energy is to eat all day long. I must eat all day long.

Zooey Deschanel

#20. In dinner talk it is perhaps allowable to fling any faggot rather than let the fire go out.

James M. Barrie

#21. Moses, who said to the Israelites, Stop calling me Charlton! Never got a dinner!

Red Buttons

#22. I think a generation ago, dads went to work, they came home, and they had their dinner, had a drink, and then went to bed. I don't know what it was like in your house, but that is how it was in mine. I think it is cool to have the dads in the trenches and doing the real parenting work.

Zach Cregger

#23. 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

#24. 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

#25. If the [actors] are working, and I have a dinner engagement, I don't do 20 takes. I do five takes and go home. I want to go to dinner.

Woody Allen

#26. Why should the Marquis de Cussy wage war on soup? I cannot understand a dinner without it. I hold soup to be the well beloved of the stomach.

Marie-Antoine Careme

#27. I had a nice dinner. I let the evening unfold, flow. I like to sit in a chair with a wine glass. When I woke up, I thought, 'Why didn't I go to bed at 11?' I came back at 3 and went to bed at 5.

Roger Federer

#28. My favorite thing in the world is to have just a big dinner with friends and just sit and talk about their life and their difficulties and all of that.

Lykke Li

#29. They say the way to a man's heart is through his stomach, right?" I said. "How about Tristan and I make you and Jax a romantic dinner? And you bake him a cake for dessert. We'll warm him up with a gourmet meal, but once he tastes your cake, he'll be putty in your hands.

Kristie Cook

#30. Michael Clarke Duncan and I met at a music festival that was honoring films, and we happened to be seated next to each other at the dinner, and we just hit it off and kept in touch ever since. He was just the gentle giant in real life like you would have expected him to be.

Nikki Blonsky

#31. The middle classes air their moral prejudices over their gross dinner-tables, and whisper about what they call the profligacies of their betters in order to try and pretend that they are in smart society and on intimate terms with the people they slander.

Oscar Wilde

#32. How awful that the artist has become nothing but the after-dinner mint of society,

Samuel Barber

#33. This war proceeds along its terrible path by the slaughter of infantry ... I say to myself every day. What is going on while we sit here, while we go away to dinner or home to bed? Nearly, 1000 - Englishmen, Britishers, and the other is America ... Everything else is swept away.

Winston Churchill

#34. 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

#35. I'm 33, my generation, when I was young, we'd go out into the woods for the entire day and come back for dinner. I was definitely a kid of the '80s, who was out and about.

Lissie

#36. 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

#37. I'm the type of woman you might say is too good. I'll massage a man's feet, have dinner cooked when he gets home. But once they leave, the door is closed, and the locks are changed.

Angie Stone

#38. What you seek in vain for, half your life, one day you come full upon, all the family at dinner. You seek it like a dream, and as soon as you find it, you become its prey

William Gaddis

#39. Holy bejeezus," Lula said, eyes bugged out, looking at the building. "This is scaring the crap out of me. This is like where Dracula would live if he didn't have any money and was a crack-head. I bet it's filled with rabid bats and killer snakes and hairy spiders as big as dinner plated.

Janet Evanovich

#40. People call me all the time and say, "Man, your players aren't signed yet." Well, it doesn't really matter what time dinner is when you're the steak.

Scott Boras

#41. On a summer night it can be lovely to sit around outside with friends after dinner and, yes, read poetry to each other. Keats and Yeats will never let you down, but it's differently exciting to read the work of poets who are still walking around out there.

Michael Cunningham

#42. I think my favorite place to eat dinner is the movie theater. Dirty dogs, a big thing of nachos and a Cherry Coke - and I'm good.

Chris Kirkpatrick

#43. There's not much to do in Atlanta, so the cast went to the gym together, went shopping together, and dinner was always a group thing. It's that whole summer-camp experience that making movies tends to be anyway.

Timothy Olyphant

#44. At one dinner he [George Smith Patton] toasted his officers' wives with the words: 'My, what pretty widows you're going to make.

Andrew Roberts

#45. Dinner is not what you do in the evening before something else. Dinner is the evening.

Art Buchwald

#46. I can't stand going out to one more dinner with some Mrs. So-and-So who might leave a million dollars to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra when she dies.

Daniel Barenboim

#47. I could stand on my head and flick the bean right there at the dinner table and my mom would be all, "Honey, Christmas is family time, we should be together" and make me finish in front of everyone.

Christopher Moore

#48. He said that few people had intellectual resources sufficient to forgo the pleasures of wine. They could not otherwise contrive how to fill the interval between dinner and supper.

Samuel Johnson

#49. Money isn't always the best motivator. If you leave a $50 check after dinner with friends, you don't increase the probability of being invited back.

Yochai Benkler

#50. The way I see film is I think film is like going out to dinner. I feel it's a banquet. You don't want to have the same food you have at home. You want to go and eat a fantastic Chinese meal or Italian or Greek.

Guillermo Del Toro

#51. Now I'm going out to dinner with my parents."
"Your parents?"
"Yeah. They really do exist."
"It's eight-thirty."
"Yeah, well if you're rich and pretentious you're supposed to eat late. It's one of the rules."
"Doesn't that become tiresome?"
"Inordinately.

Todd Young

#52. 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

#53. I love to watch those old movies on late-night television, particularly when a couple get up from a champagne dinner in a posh restaurant and the hero hands the waiter $3. But the best part is when he says, "Keep the change."

Robert Orben

#54. I grew up with a lot of dinner table conversations about health care and ways in which the system was inadequate for the needs of many of the patients they took care of.

Risa J. Lavizzo-Mourey

#55. My closest adviser is my wife. It's nice to have one of the smartest people in business as your life partner, and someone you have dinner with and breakfast with.

Dave Goldberg

#56. Tomorrow is the benefit dinner for the Save the Chameleon Fund. The Decentville Zoo thinks their chameleons are either dead, missing, or plaid.

M T Anderson

#57. My companion at the press drank every day a pint before breakfast, a pint at breakfast with his bread and cheese, a pint between breakfast and dinner, a pint at dinner, a pint in the afternoon about six o'clock, and another when he had done his day's work.

Benjamin Franklin

#58. Our complimentary dinner that evening was really quite nice. I have always found that free meals taste just a little bit better, and after two days of the rapacious greed of the Key West economy, this was succulent indeed. And

Jeff Lindsay

#59. 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

#60. Well with me now is Geoffrey Robinson. He was once voted 'After-dinner Speaker of the Year', so if you've had your tea, you're in for a treat

Eddie Mair

#61. I'm very neurotic about shaving. I shave first thing in the morning before a shoot, and if I have dinner that night, I have to shave again.

Christine Teigen

#62. There are men here and there to whom the whole of life is like an after-dinner hour with a cigar; easy, pleasant, empty, perhaps enlivened by some fable of strife to be forgotten - before the end is told - even if there happens to be any end to it.

Joseph Conrad

#63. Life is full of moments that are good - winning a lottery, seeing a beautiful woman, a great dinner - but the whole thing is tragic. It's an oasis that is very pleasant.

Woody Allen

#64. When we ever invited the beast to dinner he didn't come in and swipe the napkins and start taking notes on the tablecloth 'bout how to take over the whole house?

Toni Cade Bambara

#65. In winter I go skiing on Saturdays and Sundays when the slopes are quieter due to changeover day for tourists, and in summer I hike up into the mountains at sunset, just as the village is settling down to dinner.

Vanessa Mae

#66. And I'm not apolitical - I'm very specific in my politics. But a lot of the time it's nobody's business unless you're over at my house having dinner.

Tom Hanks

#67. 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

#68. Dinner will be served at the usual time and I am pleased to say there will be no discernible traces left of the recent occurrence by that time.

Kazuo Ishiguro

#69. When I look back, I can say that the summer when I was 19 was a formative time for me. But at the time I just thought I was making tofu every night for dinner and going to work.

Zoe Kazan

#70. Kevyn, Ennesby tells me you are building a time machine.
Actually I'm finished.
In one afternoon? Wow ... Does it work?
After a fashion.
...
I put a whole lot of energy into it, and the next thing I knew it was time for dinner.
-Captain Tagon & Commander Andreyasn

Howard Tayler

#71. 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

#72. He didn't ask - of course he didn't ask - but he did show up at the captain's quarters one evening after dinner looking sheepish.

Cassandra Rose Clarke

#73. I'm sorry about the dinner."
"Best date ever. Well, until people died and vampires showed up. But before that it was awesome.

Ilona Andrews

#74. I think cookies are sort of the unsung sweet, you know? They're incredibly popular. But everybody thinks of cakes and pies and fancier desserts before they think cookies. A plate of cookies is a great way to end dinner and really nice to share at the holidays.

Bobby Flay

#75. 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

#76. The fact that mammalian crying serves as a cue for maternal support, rather than as a dinner bell, is a major evolutionary difference.

Matthew D. Lieberman

#77. I would have invited friends over to dinner even if the carpet was stained, or the sofa faded.

Erma Bombeck

#78. It was easy to be nice to an attractive woman over a dinner table. The despair came later, with children and tiredness and the sheer drudgery of marriage and monogamy.

Nick Hornby

#79. BRAINSTORMING! Every night after dinner - which is usually something like tuna noodle casserole made with cream-of-wallpaper soup - I escape to the privacy of my bedroom.

James Patterson

#80. We all like to look forward to things. Incentivize yourself with a reward - a massage, dinner with a friend, a night watching your favorite show, a yoga class on Saturday morning. Visualizing a reward at the end of the to-do tunnel may help with reaching goals/completing tasks.

Samantha Ettus

#81. His Zen is genetic. You should meet his parents. You could rob them at gunpoint and they would still ask you to dinner and make sure you got everything valuable in the house,

Rachel Higginson

#82. I have written things that Republicans and Democrats and all kinds of figures have either hated or felt very uncomfortable about. Because in doing these long projects and books, you get close to the bone. And they're not calling me up and asking me for dinner.

Bob Woodward

#83. You hear terrible stories because there'll be a story about some terrible kid, but most of the kids I work with are terrific kids. They're poor, maybe their families are broken, so they're not coming home to a mom and dad and a nice dinner every night. But these kids are capable.

Rafe Esquith

#84. Jack the Ripper's mother, who said to Jack, How come I never see you with the same girl twice? Never got a dinner!

Red Buttons

#85. I need to have small morsels of sweets. If I have a day with the fam with a big family dinner, then I'll indulge ... but then the next day or two I'll really be strict. I learned that from Dolly Parton, by the way!

Kimberly Schlapman

#86. When I usually go to my studio to work, I start with something that is going to take two minutes just to put some idea down and the next thing I know, ten hours have gone by and my family is screaming at me because they want me to come up to have dinner with them.

Geddy Lee

#87. 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

#88. Pope John Paul II's press secretary, who said, See, if only the Pope were Italian, he woulda shot back! Never got a dinner!

Red Buttons

#89. Never argue at the dinner table, for the one who is not hungry always gets the best of the argument.

Richard Whately

#90. I rushed us out of your parents' house because I didn't think I could manage two hours at the dinner table with everyone focused on Joe Loosey's joystick sitting in the refrigerator next to the applesauce.

Janet Evanovich

#91. 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

#92. Many people see the chance to eat something for nothing, without the need to cook or wash up, as the great consolation of going out to dinner. But they forget quite how difficult it is to talk to a stranger and eat at the same time.

Craig Brown

#93. I don't take fancy vacations. I buy all my jewelry at Claire's. I can't remember the last time I went out to a fancy dinner. My family lives in a modest two-bedroom apartment, and my kids share a bedroom. But I do have one extravagant vice: shoes.

Nancy Lublin

#94. Frankie," she said softly, "do you know what my idea of heaven is? A place where the windows are always clean, and the people I want can always come to dinner.

Helen Hudson

#95. I am open to conviction on all points except dinner and debts. I hold that the one must be eaten and the other paid.

George Eliot

#96. There was an innocent piece of dinner-furniture that went upon easy castors and was kept over a livery stable-yard in Duke Street, Saint James's, when not in use, to whom the Veneerings were a source of blind confusion. The name of this article was Twemlow.

Charles Dickens

#97. Star salt (the stars' reflection in a river) Sun cradle (the sea) Lemon kiss (everyone knew exactly what this meant!) Family anchor (the dinner table)

Nina George

#98. Doctor says to a man, "You're pregnant!" The man says, "How does a man get pregnant?" The doctor says, "The usual way - a little wine, a little dinner ... "

Henny Youngman

#99. Hit ain't sacrilege. Miss Effie Belle says when she cain't think what to have for dinner, she asts God and right off He gives her an idea. To my thinkin', thet's sacrilege."
Miss Love really laughed. "There's not a woman in the world who hasn't prayed what to cook for dinner, Rucker!

Olive Ann Burns

#100. Who lives in true poverty - The janitor who is grateful for the chocolate chip pancakes his 6 year old helped his wife prepare for dinner, or The CEO who is ungrateful for the type of wine served with his 5-star meal?

Julia Rose