Quotes about coffee
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Max Frisch photo
Ayaan Hirsi Ali photo

“The coffee having arrived (how hard it is to write without the ablative absolute!) we guzzled genteelly for a while…”

Kyril Bonfiglioli (1928–1985) British art dealer

Source: The Mortdecai Trilogy, Don't Point That Thing At Me (1972), Ch. 4.

Harper Lee photo

“Well, they’re Southern people, and if they know you are working at home they think nothing of walking right in for coffee. But they wouldn’t dream of interrupting you at golf.”

Harper Lee (1926–2016) American author

On why she has done her best creative thinking while playing golf, as quoted in Time (12 May 1980)

Ricky Hatton photo

“I've been giving a little gamble on the roulette and just sitting having a coffee with the fans, chatting away.”

Ricky Hatton (1978) English former professional boxer

Ricky Hatton commenting on Las Vagas http://news2.thdo.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/funny_old_game/6275535.stm

John Steinbeck photo
John Fante photo
Gloria Estefan photo

“[Cuban coffee is] very powerful, very sweet, and a little dangerous —- just like the people who drink it.”

Gloria Estefan (1957) Cuban-American singer-songwriter, actress and divorciada

Entertainment Weekly (30 July 1993)
2007, 2008

Hamid Dabashi photo
Alison Bechdel photo
Bill Clinton photo

“A few years ago, this guy would have been getting us coffee.”

Bill Clinton (1946) 42nd President of the United States

Remarks allegedly made about Barack Obama to Ted Kennedy in 2008, as quoted in Game Change : Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime (2010) in John Heilemann and Mark Halperin
Attributed

Timo K. Mukka photo
Alfred P. Sloan photo

“My father was in the wholesale tea, coffee, and cigar business, with a firm called Bennett-Sloan and Company. In 1885 he moved the business to New York City, on West Broadway, and from the age of ten I grew up in Brooklyn. I am told I still have the accent. My father's father was a schoolteacher. My mother's father was a Methodist minister. My parents had five children, of whom I am the oldest. There is my sister, Mrs. Katharine Sloan Pratt, now a widow. There are my three brothers — Clifford, who was in the advertising business; Harold, a college professor; and Raymond, the youngest, who is a professor, writer, and expert on hospital administration. I think we have all had in common a capability for being dedicated to our respective interests.
I came of age at almost exactly the time when the automobile business in the United States came into being. In 1895 the Duryeas, who had been experimenting with motor cars, started what I believe was the first gasoline-automobile manufacturing company in the United States. In the same year I left the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a a BS. in electrical engineering, and went to work for the Hyatt Roller Bearing Company of Newark, later of Harrison, New Jersey. The Hyatt antifriction bearing was later to become a component of the automobile, and it was through this component that I came into the automotive industry. Except for one early and brief departure from it, I have spent my life in the industry.”

Alfred P. Sloan (1875–1966) American businessman

Source: My Years with General Motors, 1963, p. 37

Irvine Welsh photo
Basshunter photo
T. E. Lawrence photo
Patrick Stump photo
Rob Pike photo
Maximilien Misson photo

“You have all Manner of News there: You have a good Fire, which you may sit by as long as you please: You have a Dish of Coffee; you meet your Friends for the Transaction of Business, and all for a Penny, if you don't care to spend more.”

Maximilien Misson (1650–1722) writer

speaking of London coffeehouses in the late 1600s
[Drummond, J.C., Wilbraham, Anne, The Englishman's food: a history of five centuries of English diet., 1957, Cape, London, 978-0224601689, 116, Rev. ed.] This source cites Misson; citation needed for original statement.

Tim Powers photo
Harry Turtledove photo

“(Sylvia) There’s not enough coffee in the whole world to turn me into a functional human being.”

Nicole Hollander (1939) Cartoonist

Source: Sylvia cartoon strip, p. 107

Edsger W. Dijkstra photo
Craig Benzine photo

“There are two things in life that keep me motivated, a cup of coffee and a second cup of coffee.”

Craig Benzine (1980) Filmmaker, comedian, presenter

Source: Robert Galinsky (2013) Coffee Crazy, p. 88

Mel Brooks photo
David Foster Wallace photo
David Mamet photo

“Before you can steal fire from the Gods you gotta be able to get coffee for the director”

David Mamet (1947) American playwright, essayist, screenwriter, and film director

Bambi vs. Godzilla: On the Nature, Purpose, and Practice of the Movie Business (2007)

Camille Paglia photo
Ian Holloway photo

“"To put it in gentleman's terms if you've been out for a night and you're looking for a young lady and you pull one, some weeks they're good looking and some weeks they're not the best. Our performance today would have been not the best looking bird but at least we got her in the taxi. She wasn't the best looking lady we ended up taking home but she was very pleasant and very nice, so thanks very much, let's have a coffee"
- on the "ugly" win against Chesterfield.”

Ian Holloway (1963) English association football player and manager

Gordon Strachan v Ian Holloway: Sportsmail picks their top 10 funny quotes ahead of Middlesbrough's showdown with Blackpool, 2009-12-08, Mail Online, 2011-04-29 http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-1234084/Gordon-Strachan-v-Ian-Holloway-Sportsmail-picks-10-funny-quotes-ahead-Middlesbroughs-showdown-Blackpool.html,
Sourced quotes

Robert Fripp photo

“Me and a book is a party. Me and a book and a cup of coffee is an orgy.”

Robert Fripp (1946) English guitarist, composer and record producer

Robert Fripp: From King Crimson to Guitar Craft (Eric Tamm)

“"Run away with me," said Roseman when the coffee came.
"Where?" she asked. That shut him up.”

Source: The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Chapter 1

George Carlin photo
John Fante photo
Ben Croshaw photo
Michael Savage photo
Whittaker Chambers photo
John Green photo

“Missing her kept him awake more than the coffee.”

Colin Singleton, p. 15
An Abundance of Katherines (2006)

Agatha Christie photo
Georges Clemenceau photo

“Americans have no capacity for abstract thought, and make bad coffee.”

Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929) French politician

As quoted in The Europeans (1984) by Luigi Barzini, p. 225
Post-Prime Ministerial

Avner Strauss photo

“Once, my wife would make me coffee. These days, she hardly puts the kettle on.”

Avner Strauss (1954) Israeli musician

Distance and other Measures (1994).

Joel Fuhrman photo
Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, marquise de Sévigné photo

“The fashion of liking Racine will pass away like that of coffee.”

La mode d'aimer Racine passera comme la mode du café.
According to Voltaire, Letters (Jan. 29, 1690), who connected two remarks of hers to make the phrase; one from a letter March 16, 1679, the other, March 10, 1672. La Harpe reduced the mot to "Racine passera comme le café?"
Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations

Emo Philips photo
James Baldwin photo

“At the rate things are going here, all of Africa will be free before we can get a lousy cup of coffee.”

James Baldwin (1924–1987) (1924-1987) writer from the United States

"A Negro Assays on the Negro Mood," The New York Times, 12 March 1961, published in book form as "East River, Downtown: Postscript to a Letter from Harlem" in Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son (1961)

Brigham Young photo
Katherine Paterson photo
George Porter photo

“Science is, on the whole, an informal activity, a life of shirt sleeves and coffee served in beakers.”

George Porter (1920–2002) British chemist

Nobel Banquet Speech http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/1967/porter-speech.html in Stockholm, December 10, 1967.

Richard Quest photo

“I am not angry. I am just disappointed that, once again, a hotel has tried to convince me it will move heaven and earth to ensure I am comfortable when, in reality, it won’t even pass me the coffee pot!”

Richard Quest (1962) English television journalist

Wednesday, August 29, 2007
His blog for CNN http://edition.cnn.com/TRAVEL/blogs/richard.quest/

St. Vincent (musician) photo
James Howard Kunstler photo
Anthony Burgess photo
Conrad Aiken photo
Jeff Foxworthy photo
Jayne Mansfield photo
April Winchell photo

“We've talked about coffee enemas and they're perfectly fine, except the doughnuts get stuck in the hose. And that just ruins everything.”

April Winchell (1960) American voice actor and writer

KFI-Los Angeles radio broadcast, March 25, 2001, 11:00 p.m. hour.

Douglas Adams photo
Dylan Moran photo
Bill Bryson photo

“But just like voices, thoughts are underpinned by physical stuff. We know this because alterations to the brain change the kinds of thoughts we can think. In a state of deep sleep, there are no thoughts. When the brain transitions into dream sleep, there are unbidden, bizarre thoughts. During the day we enjoy our normal, well-accepted thoughts, which people enthusiastically modulate by spiking the chemical cocktails of the brain with alcohol, narcotics, cigarettes, coffee, or physical exercise. The state of the physical material determines the state of the thoughts. And the physical material is absolutely necessary for normal thinking to tick along. If you were to injure your pinkie in an accident you’d be distressed, but your conscious experience would be no different. By contrast, if you were to damage an equivalently sized piece of brain tissue, this might change your capacity to understand music, name animals, see colors, judge risk, make decisions, read signals from your body, or understand the concept of a mirror—thereby unmasking the strange, veiled workings of the machinery beneath. Our hopes, dreams, aspirations, fears, comic instincts, great ideas, fetishes, senses of humor, and desires all emerge from this strange organ—and when the brain changes, so do we. So although it’s easy to intuit that thoughts don’t have a physical basis, that they are something like feathers on the wind, they in fact depend directly on the integrity of the enigmatic, three-pound mission control center.”

David Eagleman (1971) neuroscientist and author

Incognito: The Secret Lives of The Brain

Samuel Hahnemann photo
Sarah Vowell photo
Boris Johnson photo
Ulysses S. Grant photo
Daniel Handler photo
George W. Bush photo

“Crank is to coffee what sexual homicide is to a goodnight kiss.”

Jim Goad (1961) Author, publisher

The Redneck Manifesto: How Hillbillies, Hicks and White Trash Became America's Scapegoats (Simon & Schuster, 1997)

Anthony Burgess photo

“…a fetid cabaret with a beer-bar, two houses of ill-fame disguised as coffee-shops…”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Fiction, Beds in the East (1959)

Yoweri Museveni photo

“When we sell a kilo of bean coffee in Uganda, we get one dollar per kilo. The same kilo, when it is processed [and sold in the UK], goes for $10, $11 or even more a kilo. That is the same situation [price disparity] that goes for all raw materials.”

Yoweri Museveni (1944) President of Uganda

As quoted in "President Museveni Highlights Ugandan Achievements for Americans: Ugandan leader proud of political opening, economic growth in his country" https://web.archive.org/web/20050927025054/http://news.findlaw.com/wash/s/20050923/200509231521551.html (23 September 2005), by Jim Fisher-Thompson, Washington File, FindLaw
2000s

Alice A. Bailey photo
Bill Bryson photo
Mark Harmon photo
Cory Doctorow photo
William Gibson photo
Daniel Handler photo
Arnold Schoenberg photo

“If music is frozen architecture, then the potpourri is frozen coffee-table gossip… Potpourri is the art of adding apples to pears…”

Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951) Austrian-American composer

quote from Glosses on the Theories of Others (1929); also in Style and Idea (1985), p. 313-314
1920s

“Our culture runs on coffee and gasoline, the first often tasting like the second.”

Source: Down the River (1982), p. 81

Vincent Gallo photo
Mark Tobey photo
Katie Hopkins photo
Dennis Miller photo
Alan Watts photo

“If Christianity is wine and Islam coffee, Buddhism is most certainly tea.”

Source: The Way of Zen (1957), p. 190

Saul Leiter photo

“I much prefer to drink coffee, listen to music and to paint when I feel like it.”

Saul Leiter (1923–2013) American photographer

As quoted in Saul Leiter (2008) by Agnès Sire
Context: In order to build a career and to be successful, one has to be determined. One has to be ambitious. I much prefer to drink coffee, listen to music and to paint when I feel like it.

P. J. O'Rourke photo
Mary Midgley photo

“The main trouble is, I think, best explained in the analogy of coffee. Natural selection is only a filter, and filters do not provide the taste of coffee that pours through them. Similarly, the range of evolutionary alternatives between which selection takes place has to be already in matter. How it comes to be present there is the real mystery about creation.”

Mary Midgley (1919–2018) British philosopher and ethicist

Are You an Illusion (2014). 16.
Context: About all these things physics can tell us nothing. The idea of natural selection, which, as we shall see, is uaully called in to account for this vast creative surge, is already looking increasingly inadequate to explain evolution. The main trouble is, I think, best explained in the analogy of coffee. Natural selection is only a filter, and filters do not provide the taste of coffee that pours through them. Similarly, the range of evolutionary alternatives between which selection takes place has to be already in matter. How it comes to be present there is the real mystery about creation.

Fabian Picardo photo

“Wake up and smell the coffee: Gibraltar will never be Spanish!”

Fabian Picardo (1972) Gibraltarian politician and barrister

Address to the Special Committee on Decolonisation in New York
2012
Context: One of the top Spanish diplomats of recent generations, Snr Inocencio Arias – who was until ten years ago Spain's Permanent Representative at the UN - has recently recognised, in a memoir, that all of Spain's strategies for the recovery of Gibraltar have failed. We did not need to be told that, nor do we want any strategy to succeed, but he is right to have started a debate in Spain which in effect is telling Spanish diplomacy what we have been saying for generations: Wake up and smell the coffee: Gibraltar will never be Spanish! Yet in recent months, the attitude of Spain's foreign ministry appears to have ignored the failures of the past and is working hard to secure even greater failures for the future.

Robert Fulghum photo

“I grew up a Southern Baptist in Texas where dancing was a mortal sin in the eyes of Almighty God, but coffee was OK. Dave grew up a Latter Day Saint where dancing was considered righteous – but not coffee.
But . . . we're dancers. And laughers. That's a strong bond right there. And we're committed to being useful in our world.”

Robert Fulghum (1937) American writer

"The Lightness Of Being" (25 April 2007) Pack Creek Ranch, San Juan County, Utah http://robertfulghum.com/index.php/fulghumweb/entry/377_the_lightness_of_being/
Web Journal
Context: The four of us are talking dancing, and laughing, and recalling the joys of being out on the floor and having that timeless feeling that comes from being caught up in the music. "Nobody should miss that," says Dave.
On the face of it, Dave's family and I don't have a lot in common. They're Mormons and Republicans. I'm a Unitarian and a Democrat. When Dave was on the County Council, we were on different sides of some important issues. I grew up a Southern Baptist in Texas where dancing was a mortal sin in the eyes of Almighty God, but coffee was OK. Dave grew up a Latter Day Saint where dancing was considered righteous – but not coffee.
But... we're dancers. And laughers. That's a strong bond right there. And we're committed to being useful in our world. And if you love something, like dancing, and you pass it on, like Dave and his wife do, you've been very useful by my standards. Dancing is a lifetime, equal opportunity sport.
And I will never drive by Dave's garage again without having the finest feelings for the man and his wife and mother who are inside taking good care of their corner of this world. They've added an important dimension to the lives of the young people of their town — that lightness of being that belongs to dancers.

Friedrich Dürrenmatt photo
James Bolivar Manson photo
W. H. Auden photo

“In the course of many centuries a few laborsaving devices have been introduced into the mental kitchen — alcohol, coffee, tobacco, Benzedrine, etc.”

but these are very crude, constantly breaking down, and liable to injure the cook. Literary composition in the twentieth century A.D. is pretty much what it was in the twentieth century B.C.: nearly everything has still to be done by hand.
"Writing", p. 17
The Dyer's Hand, and Other Essays (1962)

John Galsworthy photo

“There are things worth being loyal to, surely. Coffee, for instance, or one’s religion.”

John Galsworthy (1867–1933) English novelist and playwright

Flowering Wilderness (1932)

T.S. Eliot photo