Best Literary Food Quotes & Sayings

For Thanksgiving, a quote from my book, The Restaurant Reviewer, with deepest thanks for all the bounty:

In the kitchen here ingredients are cherished. This restaurant remembers that food tastes good. — Nao Hauser

In America we saw more food than we had seen in all our lives and we were so happy we rummaged through the dustbins of our souls to retrieve the stained, broken pieces of God. — NoViolet Bulawayo

Of course I didn't pioneer the use of food in fiction: it has been a standard literary device since Chaucer and Rabelais, who used food wonderfully as a metaphor for sensuality. — Joanne Harris

These (literary) studies are the food of youth, and consolation of age; they adorn prosperity, and are the comfort and refuge of adversity; they are pleasant at home, and are no incumbrance abroad; they accompany us at night, in our travels, and in our rural retreats. — Marcus Tullius Cicero

literary fiction is fiction that examines the character of the people involved in the story, and that popular fiction is driven by plot. Whereas popular fiction, I tell them, is meant primarily as a means of escape, one way or another, from this present life, a kind of book equivalent of comfort food, literary fiction confronts us with who we are and makes us look deeply at the human condition. — Bret Lott

Kid's books should be just as good as any other books. No. They should be held to a *higher* standard than other literature for the same reason that we take extra care with children's food. — Patrick Rothfuss

Some people say he engineered his own arrest to gain an insight into modern methods of policing for a thriller he had planned. But you know what happens to artistic rats in prison: they have their rectums stretched, and not by overindulgence in Michelin-star food; they have their columns examined, and not by internet humorists or a qualified medical practitioner. I'm sure Rat knew this, too. Although he likes to accumulate a wide general knowledge, he would rather have a narrow rectum. A colon comes in handy here, before examples: two dots on top of one other, like the cowboys who copulate on Brokeback Mountain, on a slope so far away you need binoculars to see them properly. In prison there are too many insights and examples. Rat would never risk it. — Graham Spaid

I am at the moment writing a lengthy indictment against our century. When my brain begins to reel from my literary labors, I make an occasional cheese dip. — John Kennedy Toole

We all have a book in us. The first step is recognising this. Writing it is a whole new journey. — Kathryn Joyce

The pale organisms of literary heroes feeding under the author's supervision swell gradually with the reader's lifeblood; so that the genius of a writer consists in giving them the faculty to adapt themselves to that - not very appetizing - food and thrive on it, sometimes for centuries. — Vladimir Nabokov

Chocolate is a perfect food, as wholesome as it is delicious, a beneficent restorer of exhausted power ... it is the best friend of those engaged in literary pursuits. — Justus Von Liebig

Sometimes he spent hours together in the great libraries of Paris, those catacombs of departed authors, rummaging among their hoards of dusty and obsolete works in quest of food for his unhealthy appetite. He was, in a manner, a literary ghoul, feeding in the charnel-house of decayed literature. — Washington Irving

Occasionally, especially at celebratory times, the whole gang of us would launch into a spontaneous mental game. For example, my mother used to send me to the back porch (a room containing no furniture but a simply incredible mass of Stuff) to get flour for holiday cakes or pies. I often returned to the kitchen, cringing with disgust, to announce that the flour was full of worms. No matter how sick this made me, I knew it wuoldn't bother my mother. She always just sifted the worms out, saying that even if she missed a few and they got into the food, they would simply be an excellent source of protein. Just as we were all beginning to feel thoroughly downtrodden, my father would save the day. "Everyone come up with a literary reference about worms!" he would shout. — Martha N. Beck

There is a feminist proverb I learned from my mother: The personal is political. There's a powerful literary stereotype that men write about war and politics and public life, while women confine themselves to family and food and personal life. — Annia Ciezadlo

If I could, I'd take the food and art of Italy, for example, couple it with the quiet, understated personality of France and the orderliness of Germany, the cinematic and literary wit of Britain, and blend it into one utopian, and ultimately dystopian, probably, civilization. — Tsh Oxenreider

The monkey liked most humans. They left food cans outside their homes for his family to rummage through in the morning
sun. Some yelled and threw sticks, but were slow and didn't bite. Humans were mostly harmless. — Cole Alpaugh