Laurie Colwin People Quotations

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.

[On television:] It's made people moronic, it's robbed people of their ability to think. It's done tremendous damage, and every single household that has a small child should take it and throw it out the window.

I was taught in my Introduction to Anthropology [course in college], it is not just the great works of [hu]mankind that make a culture. It is the daily things, like what people eat and how they serve it.

Both happy and sad people can be cheered up by a nice meal,

Dinner alone is one of life's pleasures. Certainly cooking for oneself reveals man at his weirdest. People lie when you ask them what they eat when they are alone. A salad, they tell you. But when you persist, they confess to peanut butter and bacon sandwiches deep fried and eaten with hot sauce, or spaghetti with butter and grape jam.

Many people eat salad dutifully because they feel it is good for them, but more enlightened types eat it happily because it is good.

The best way to eat crabs, as everyone knows, is off newspaper at a large table with a large number of people.

It is my opinion that Norman Rockwell and his ilk have done more to make already anxious people feel guilty than anyone else.

It is not just the Great Works of mankind that make a culture. It is the daily things, like what people eat and how they serve it.

Cooking is like anything else: some people have an inborn talent for it. Some become expert by practicing, and some learn from books.

As everyone knows, there is only one way to fry chicken correctly. Unfortunately, most people think their method is best, but most people are wrong. Mine is the only right way, and on this subject I feel almost evangelical.

Unlike some people, who love to go out, I love to stay home.

The sharing of food is the basis of social life, and to many people it is the only kind of social life worth participating in.

Once my jars were labeled, I felt contentedly thrilled with myself, as if I had pulled off a wonderful trick. People feel this way when they bake bread or have babies, and although they are perfectly entitled to feel that way, in fact, nature does most of the work.

The old days were slower. People buttered their bread without guilt and sat down to dinner en famille.