My dinners have never interfered with my business. They have been my recreation…A public banquet (dinner), if eaten with thought and care, is no more of a strain than a dinner at home. – Chauncey DePew (1834-1928)

Dining out is a vice. A dissipation of spirit punished by remorse. – Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave (1944)

Why should so vast a national expenditure be left entirely to chance? – Duncan Hines, Adventures in Good Eating (1936)

An oyster is a fish built like a nut. – Anonymous

If you don’t love life you can’t enjoy an oyster; there is a shock of freshness to it and intimations of the ages of man, some piercing intuition of the sea and all its weeds and breezes. – Eleanor Clark, The Oysters of Locmariaquer (1964)

A flaccid, moping, debauched mollusk, tired from too much love and loose-nerved from general world conditions, can be a shameful thing served raw upon the shell. – M. F. K. Fisher, Consider the Oyster (1941) — on why you shouldn’t eat oysters in the warm weather months.

The hardest thing about being on a diet is shutting up about it. – ELV

I’ve been on a diet for two weeks and all I’ve lost is two weeks. – Totie Fields

If only it was as easy to banish hunger by rubbing the belly as it is to masturbate. – Diogenes the Cynic (c. 390-320 B.C.)

And do as adversaries do in law,

Strive mightily, but eat and drink as friends.

William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew (1593-1594)

If it is good to have one foot in England, it is still better, or at least as good, to have the other out of it. – Henry James

Great restaurants are, of course, nothing but mouth brothels. – Frederic Raphael

The key to a successful restaurant is dressing girls in degrading clothes. – Michael O’Donoghue

And every oblation of thy meat offering shalt thou season with salt. – Leviticus 2:13

Salt is white and pure — there is something holy in salt. – Nathaniel Hawthorne

New Orleans is a town where an architect, a gourmet, or a roue is in hog heaven. – George Sessions Perry

I never eat when I can dine. – Maurice Chevalier

Eating is not merely a material pleasure. Eating well gives a spectacular joy to life and contributes immensely to goodwill and happy companionship. It is of great importance to the morale. – Elsa Schiaparelli