Dinner Party Quotes

Whether it's a big dinner party or people just coming over to hang out, I just love to spend time with them.

I think with success you do get a little more guarded and you start to change your friends. You become more isolated. And you start hanging around with people who have money! I think that's the biggest thing. Once you do get a bit of change in your pocket, you start hanging around with other people who have some change. It was kind of strange to all of a sudden go from one extreme-Manhattan-to where I went, upstate New York. But I did it because I was dying in the city. I couldn't take it. I couldn't take one more dinner party. I couldn't take one more party, period.

I mean, being provincial is a privilege in a way. Also people in New York think everybody interacts because they all take the subway. "Oh, I see all these different people! All these different walks of life on the subway." Well, they're not coming to your dinner party. Certainly, in small-town Nebraska, everyone indeed did mix together.

Some people play the piano, some do Sudoku, some watch television, some people go out to dinner parties. I write books.

A collection is like a dinner party. It is made up of the people you invite, but also the people you don't.

Often you see a famous actor who says they produced something, when all they did was claim to have an idea at a dinner party and make three phone calls.

I like being around people who are good conversationalists. When there's a give and take, and you are heightening an idea, exploring it together, that is my favorite thing in the world. I love a small dinner party - let's say six people, max, where everybody's having the same conversation. That's my favorite thing in the world.

The 20-minute walk I take is better than the 3-mile run I never start. Having people over for take-out is better than never having people to an elegant dinner party.

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.

I still have the shirt I wore my first time on Johnny Carson's show. Only now I use it as a tablecloth at dinner parties. It was very blousy.

You can imagine the kind of dinner parties I had to go to at a young age... pretty dull.

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

Life is very tough, you know. You sit at a dinner party and talk to the person on your right or your left, you're going to hear something terribly sad, or horrible, or awful. And you just laugh at everything. I think it was Winston Churchill who said something like, any time you get someone to laugh, you're giving them a little vacation. It's so true. You laugh for one second, you're happy. I find in negotiations, everybody's sitting around looking so serious, I say something funny and it breaks the ice. And it's like, now we can get through this.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

I'd rather dig a ditch than go to a dinner party with people I don't know.

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

I consider a good dinner party at our house to be where people drink and eat more than they're meant to.

At every party there are two kinds of people - those who want to go home and those who don't. The trouble is, they are usually married to each other.

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.

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.

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.

We all have firm favourites we bring out at a dinner parties, but it's nice to try something a bit more edgy, or more time-consuming.

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.

In England especially, I've found that if you bring up King Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson at a dinner party or a social gathering, it's like throwing a Molotov cocktail into the room.

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

In fact, I've only been to a couple of other people's dinner parties. But I must admit, I really enjoyed the few I've been to, but I'm not really on that circuit.

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.

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.

I can only cook brown rice and vegetables, so I don't get too many people coming over for dinner parties or anything.

I settled in with The Uninvited Guests thinking I knew what kind of Edwardian pleasures were in store: the fraught dinner party in an endangered, rambling house, the feuding family, the rich suitor, the disruptive visitors. The novel has all of those delightful things, but it also defied every one of my expectations. I saw none of it coming. I read it in one breathless sitting, and finished wanting to give it to everyone I know.

A man filled with meat turns his back on the dry bones of political doctrine. Fanatical devotion to the ruling party comes more readily from the materially deprived At a dinner party one should eat wisely but not too well, and talk well but not too wisely.

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? Do not stop it. Is it not yet come? Do not stretch your desire towards it, but wait till it reaches you. Do this with regard to children, to a spouse, to public post, to riches, and you will eventually be a worthy guest at the feast of life.

It is a fact of life that people give dinner parties, and when they invite you, you have to turn around and invite them back. Often they retaliate by inviting you again, and you must then extend another invitation. Back and forth you go, like Ping-Pong balls, and what you end up with is called social life.

Food Throwers: Begun usually by estranged couples, once this victual flinging starts, everyone will do it...Should your dinner party have become an out of control concussion match with opponents catapulting croutons and petits pois across the mahogany, don't fight it, go with it. And when you have the desire to quell the uprising approach the original perpetrator from behind. There, slowly crown her with the contents of the fresh fruit salad bowl. But be warned. Although this immobilizes and rivits everyone's attention it also gives them new ideas.

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.

[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.

I'm vey bad at marshaling arguments. I can't, at a dinner party, explain why I'm a socialist and why others should be socialists as well.

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

Well let's face it, who on earth besides antique dealers and gay couples actually still give dinner parties?

The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animal.

I'm sick of the ignorance that lack of funding has generated, of the fathers who apporach me at dinner parties with their four-year-old girls clasped to their pant legs and say, "Yeah, but studies say kids can buy drugs more easily than they can buy alcohol." To which I always respond, "I guess that means you keep heroin in your liquor cabinet?

My mum and dad used to make me stand up at dinner parties and sing to their friends. I had this conservatory in my house - three steps went to up to kind of a raised part of our kitchen. I used it as the stage. Every night after school I used to download backing tracks of songs I loved and perform to myself. My mum was trying to cook and I was pretending I was at the O2 arena.

I adore summer entertaining. For a dinner party at the farm, I might prepare homemade fettuccine with porcini mushrooms, soft-shell crabs, spinach from the garden, and lemon tarts with fraises des bois for dessert.

Because we are denied knowledge of our history, we are deprived of standing upon each other's shoulders and building upon each other's hard earned accomplishments. Instead we are condemned to repeat what others have done before us and thus we continually reinvent the wheel. The goal of The Dinner Party is to break this cycle.

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