Table Quotes

The way you have bipartisan negotiations, you sit down across the table, as we did with Ted Kennedy, as I've done with many other members, and you say, 'OK, here's what I want, here's what you want. We'll adhere to your principles, but we'll make concessions.'

Some of the most important conversations I've ever had occurred at my family's dinner table.

I always like to have flowers on the table. I think they make it look special.

No matter what message you are about to deliver somewhere, whether it is holding out a hand of friendship, or making clear that you disapprove of something, is the fact that the person sitting across the table is a human being, so the goal is to always establish common ground.

But I believe that there are marriages where you can have your pool table and she can have her scrapbooking room or garden or whatever it is. But when everyone has what they want, it's not funny. There's no conflict.

You know, there was not much wire work for any of us actors to do because the extent of what they did was so huge. I mean, they wouldn't just throw you from this table to that wall.

Again, I think we have much greater diplomatic weight by having all of us sit on the same side of the table wanting the same thing, and putting it to the North Koreans.

Our bottom line, if you want to call it a red line, president's bottom line has been that Iran will not acquire a nuclear weapon and we will take no option off the table to ensure that it does not acquire a nuclear weapon, including the military option.

I've never believed that the only way to make a dent is to be a table thumper.

I used to forget that I was an Indian woman. I would even forget that I was a woman. I don't think of myself as bringing to the table a lot of 'women's issues.' I don't feel the need to write about maternity. I grew up thinking that the talented people in comedy were hard-joke writers.

If you want to fight a war on drugs, sit down at your own kitchen table and talk to your own children.

Mom and Dad were married 64 years. And if you wondered what their secret was, you could have asked the local florist - because every day Dad gave Mom a rose, which he put on her bedside table. That's how she found out what happened on the day my father died - she went looking for him because that morning, there was no rose.

When I was writing my column, I would almost always be recognized when I was in a restaurant, even if I was reviewing it and had booked under a fake name, so free stuff would start coming out of the kitchen on a conveyer belt, fantastic wines would be opened at my table. Now I can't even get a reservation on the pizza joint on the corner.

It used to be twelve people crowded around a sewing table; now it's ten.

You can't go to a negotiating table pointing a gun, but you've got to keep it over your shoulder.

I remember him watching me through the crack of a door singing with a hairbrush. I was in front of his mirror. I think he wanted me to sing. He would get me on the table and make me sing sometimes or play the piano. He was very encouraging on that front.

One congressman asked 'I just want to know if you've accepted Jesus Christ as your personal savior. The minister looked stunned, and he said 'no.' The whole table almost fell on the floor. The congressman was quite serious. That was his litmus test.

When a pile of cups is tottering on the edge of the table and you warn that they will crash to the ground, in South Africa you are blamed when that happens.

Once you're in charge of your job, your house, your children, getting the food on the table, doing all of this, all of the time, it'd be nice for someone else to be in charge for a bit maybe.

It's always performing for me. I write and I record so I can perform. It all ties to that. I've done it since I was a little kid. That's my absolute rush, is playing for different people every night, bringing something else to the table they've never seen.

We sat together as a family for dinner at night. And my mother had a job. My dad had a job. But there was always a meal on the table at 6:00, you know.

You don't get to pick your partners in families; you get assigned a seat at the table.

Their kitchen is their shrine, the cook their priest, the table their altar, and their belly their god.

My family... always had the value of the family table and these cultural influences of growing up.

Also, there are seats in the diner that always fall off the table. If you have a scene where you're packing up at the end of the day and putting them on the table, they just slide off.

Oh, I love making independent films, it's such a special, magical thing because you collaborate with a small group of people and everyone's pitching in. You'll see producers setting up the lunch table and the sound guy driving a van. We're all really there because we want to be.

You would not exist if you did not have something to bring to the table of life.

A single conversation across the table with a wise man is better than ten years mere study of books.

I was always interested in French poetry sort of as a sideline to my own work, I was translating contemporary French poets. That kind of spilled out into translation as a way to earn money, pay for food and put bread on the table.

If you come to a negotiation table saying you have the final truth, that you know nothing but the truth and that is final, you will get nothing.