“Do you know what breakfast cereal is made of? It’s made of all those little curly wooden shavings you find in pencil sharpeners!”
Roald Dahl

“Parsley is gharsley.”
Ogden NashFood

“When the watermelons were as large as a child’s head, the women boiled them, but they collapsed into a tasteless green mush that no one could eat, not the children, not the cow.”
 Annie ProulxAccordion Crimes

“But if you’re gonna dine with them cannibals
Sooner or later, darling, you’re gonna get eaten . . .”
Nick Cave

“Food is an important part of a balanced diet.”
Fran Lebowitz

“A Paradox, the doughnut hole. Empty space, once, but now they’ve learned to market even that. A minus quantity; nothing, rendered edible. I wondered if they might be used-metaphorically, of course-to demonstrate the existence of God. Does naming a sphere of nothingness transmute it into being?”
Margaret Atwood, Der blinde Mörder / The Blind Assassin

“Meat isn’t murder, it’s delicious.”
John Lydon

“fruit and vedgetables and the sort of things that uncle vernon called “rabit food”
J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

“Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods’ roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.”
James Joyce, Ulysses

“Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.”
Kate Moss

“Pizza tastes as good as being skinny feels.”
Lauren Leto

“I never touch sugar, cheese, bread…
I only like what I’m allowed to like. I’m beyond temptation. There is no weakness. When I see tons of food in the studio, for us and for everybody, for me it’s as if this stuff was made out of plastic. The idea doesn’t even enter my mind that a human being could put that into their mouth. I’m like the animals in the forest. They don’t touch what they cannot eat.”
Karl Lagerfeld

“1 billion people in the world are chronically hungry. 1 billion people are overweight.”
Mark Bittman, Food Matters: A Guide to Conscious Eating with More Than 75 Recipes

“My own feeling is that if adultery is wickedness then so is food. Both make me feel so much better afterward.”
Kurt Vonnegut, Hocus Pocus

“I thank you for calling them off, young ser. I promise you, they would have found me indigestible.” 
George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones

“If women are breadwinners and men bring home the bacon, why do people complain about having no dough? I’m confused. Also hungry.”
Stephen Colbert

“She spoke of evenings in the country making popcorn on the porch. Once this would have gladdened my heart but because her heart was not glad when she said it I knew there was nothing in it but the idea of what one should do.”
Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“I always thought eating was a ridiculous activity anyway. I’d get out of it myself if I could, though you’ve got to do it to stay alive, they tell me.”
Margaret Atwood, The Edible Woman

“If I had thought the beef marrow might be a hell of a lot of work for not much difference, I needn’t have worried. The taste of the marrow is rich, meaty, intense in a nearly-too-much way. In my increasingly depraved state, I could think of nothing at first but that it tasted like really good sex. But there was something more than that, even. What it really tastes like is life, well lived. Of course the cow I got marrow from had a fairly crappy life – lots of crowds and overmedication and bland food that might or might not have been a relative. But deep in his or her bones, there was a capacity for feral joy. I could taste it.”
Julie Powell, Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously

“Do we really want to travel in hermetically sealed popemobiles through the rural provinces of France, Mexico and the Far East, eating only in Hard Rock Cafes and McDonalds? Or do we want to eat without fear, tearing into the local stew, the humble taqueria’s mystery meat, the sincerely offered gift of a lightly grilled fish head? I know what I want. I want it all. I want to try everything once.”
Anthony BourdainKitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly

“He was a bold man that first ate an oyster.”
Jonathan Swift

“There are people in the world so hungry, that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread.”
Mahatma Gandhi

“The only time to eat diet food is while you’re waiting for the steak to cook.”
Julia Child

What I say is that, if a man really likes potatoes, he must be a pretty decent sort of fellow.”
A.A. Milne

“You are what what you eat eats.”
Michael PollanIn Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto

“If you can eat with mates or friends or family, I mean, it’s such a brilliant thing isn’t it? If you feel really rubbish and you have a nice bit of food it makes you feel good, you know?”
Jamie Oliver

“Eaters of Wonder Bread
Must be underbred.
So little to eat.
Where’s the wheat?”
Roy Blount Jr.

“Nearly everyone wants as least one outstanding meal a day.”
Duncan Hines

“Your people eat dry and tasteless flesh but it is off plates as smooth as ivory and as round as the sun.”
C.S. LewisThat Hideous Strength

“A burrito is a delicious food item that breaks down all social barriers and leads to temporary spiritual enlightenment.”
Lisi HarrisonMonster High

“Thanks cows. I appreciate your tastiness.”
Craig Ferguson

“foodstuffs absolved of the obligation to provide vitamins and minerals cavorted with reckless abandon.”
Michael Lewis

Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what’s for lunch.”
Orson Welles

“If more of us valued food and cheer above hoarded gold, it would be a much merrier world.”
J.R.R. Tolkien

“He showed the words “chocolate cake” to a group of Americans and recorded their word associations. “Guilt” was the top response. If that strikes you as unexceptional, consider the response of French eaters to the same prompt: “celebration.”
Michael Pollan

“Parla Come Mangi’ –It is a common way to say ‘be simple’, ‘don’t try to be rhetorical’ literaly: ‘speak the way you eat”
Elizabeth GilbertEat, Pray, Love

“Seize the moment. Remember all those women on the ‘Titanic’ who waved off the dessert cart.”
Erma Bombeck

“One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.”
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

If God gives you a Quiznos, can I have a bite? No way. You have to pray for your own food.”
Michael Grant, Hunger

How can you govern a country which has 246 varieties of cheese?”
Charles de Gaulle

“Tis an ill cook that cannot lick his own fingers.”
William Shakespeare

“Sex is good, but not as good as fresh sweet corn.”
Garrison Keillor

“Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”
Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto

“The only real stumbling block is fear of failure. In cooking you’ve got to have a what-the-hell attitude.”
Julia Child

“You can’t just eat good food. You’ve got to talk about it too. And you’ve got to talk about it to somebody who understands that kind of food.”
Kurt Vonnegut, Jailbird

Vegetarians, and their Hezbollah-like splinter-faction, the vegans, are a persistent irritant to any chef worth a damn.

To me, life without veal stock, pork fat, sausage, organ meat, demi-glace, or even stinky cheese is a life not worth living.

Vegetarians are the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit, an affront to all I stand for, the pure enjoyment of food. The body, these waterheads imagine, is a temple that should not be polluted by animal protein. It’s healthier, they insist, though every vegetarian waiter I’ve worked with is brought down by any rumor of a cold.

Oh, I’ll accomodate them, I’ll rummage around for something to feed them, for a ‘vegetarian plate’, if called on to do so. Fourteen dollars for a few slices of grilled eggplant and zucchini suits my food cost fine.”
Anthony Bourdain

“You can tell a lot about a fellow’s character by his way of eating jellybeans. ”
Ronald Reagan

“As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of the wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and to make plans.”
Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

There is no love sincerer than the love of food.
George Bernard Shaw

But I always felt that I’d rather be provincial hot-tamale than soup without seasoning.
F. Scott Fitzgerald in This Side of Paradise

Conversation is the enemy of food and good wine.
Alfred Hitchcock

Garlic is the ‘vanilla’ of Provence.
French proverb

It doesn’t matter who you are, or what you’ve done, or think you can do. There’s a confrontation with destiny awaiting you. Somewhere, there is a chile you cannot eat.
Daniel Pinkwater, A Hot Time in Nairobi

Pepper is small in quantity and great in virtue.
Plato

In order to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe.
Carl Sagan, Cosmos

Stock to a cook is voice to a singer.
Anonymous

After all the trouble you go to, you get about as much actual ‘food’ out of eating an artichoke as you would from licking 30 or 40 postage stamps.
Miss Piggy

Food without wine is a corpse; wine without food is a ghost; united and well matched they are as body and soul, living partners.
Andre Simon

A gourmet who thinks of calories is like a tart who looks at her watch.
James Beard

Grub first, then ethics
Bertolt Brecht, 1898-1956.

The trouble with eating Italian food is that five or six days later you’re hungry again.
George Miller

The rule is, jam tomorrow and jam yesterday —but never jam today.
Lewis Carroll

You better cut the pizza in four pieces because I’m not hungry enough to eat six.
Yogi Berra

There is no such thing as a little garlic.
Arthur Baer

Reminds me of my safari in Africa. Somebody forgot the corkscrew and for several days we had to live on nothing but food and water.
WC Fields

Cauliflower is cabbage with a college education.
Mark Twain

A prohibitionist is the sort of man one wouldn’t care to drink with— even if he drank.
H.L. Mencken

It is the destiny of mint to be crushed.
Waverly Root

While it is undeniably true that people love a surprise, it is equally true that they are seldom pleased to suddenly and without warning happen upon a series of prunes in what they took to be a normal loin of pork.
Fran Lebowitz

What I love about cooking is that after a hard day, there is something comforting about the fact that you melt butter and add flour, then hot stock, it will get thick! It’s a sure thing. It’s a sure thing in a world where nothing is sure!
Nora Ephron

Everything you see I owe to spaghetti.
Sophia Loren