“Modern restaurant cooking is first and foremost a boat that, as in a Saul Steinberg drawing, steams its way downriver from the thousand dreamy islands of alcohol to the wide beckoning current of caffeine, from the stress-busting drink to the reawakening demitasse. A modern French meal not including both…is impossible to imagine. Dinner with water is dinner for prisoners.”
Adam Gopnik
more infosource: The Table Comes First: Family, France, and the Meaning of Food (New York: Knopf, 2011), 31.
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category: coffee, food, French cooking, water, wine
medium: Nonfiction
“I am a completely horizontal author. I can’t think unless I’m lying down, either in bed or stretched on a couch and with a cigarette and coffee handy. I’ve got to be puffing and sipping. As the afternoon wears on, I shift from coffee to mint tea to sherry to martinis.”
Truman Capote
more infosource: The Paris Review Interviews, vol. I (New York: Picador, 2006), 28.
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category: alcohol, cigarette, coffee, creativity, habit, horizontal, routine, writing
medium: interview
notes: Originally published in Issue 16 of The Paris Review, 1957.
coffee