J. K. Rowling Quotes

Cocktail party: A gathering held to enable forty people to talk about themselves at the same time. The man who remains after the liquor is gone is the host.

In between the Queen and the First Lady, Nancy Reagan, sat Tony Richardson, looking very calm. Later on it emerged that this was because, having not been apprised of the placement until he was about to sit down, he had died of fright. To have expired was to be fortunate.

I wish I got invited to more luaus. I really do!

I don't want to bother them and ruin the party they are preparing so carefully at La Scala.

When I was ten, I had a weird cinema party where I invited everyone from my street to come. I pretended I was an usher and tried to sell them all popcorn.

I think the time of the formal dinners is over.

I feel like I have been portrayed as if I was standing outside Cipriani hoping someone picks me as their plus-one.

I taught at a cotillion. I was one of the teenage helpers when I was in high school. But we're talking very basic.

Everyone acknowledges that dinner parties are equally dull in London and Paris, in Calcutta and in New York, unless the next neighbour happens to be peculiarly agreeable.

But I remember feeling as a producer I felt like the guy who called the caterer and got the band; I had to work the party while everybody else was having a good time.

You always want to go to a party where you get an invite.

The formal Washington dinner party has all the spontaneity of a Japanese imperial funeral.

Making an effort is polite, and getting ready and looking after yourself makes an event more fun.

He may not enter anywhere at the first, unless there be some one of the household who bid him to come, though afterwards he can come as he please.

I've never been to a black-tie thing in my life. I didn't even go to my prom.

When we're discussing who to invite to a dinner party, my wife Chaz and I sometimes use the shorthand, 'good value for money,' which indicates guests expected to be entertaining.

Up to now you have been missing the party

Arranging an official dinner in an embassy is a little like writing a script for a play. The prolog is the guest list, often the most difficult part of the whole creative operation.

Truly good manners are invisible: they ease the way for others, without drawing attention to themselves. It is no accident that the word "punctilious" ("attentive to formality or etiquette") comes from the same original root as punctuation.

I have a talent for missing the best and greatest parties.

There must be some good in the cocktail party to account for its immense vogue among otherwise sane people.

If the door has been opened and I've been invited, or if I'm not invited and I somehow know I'm supposed to go in there, I put myself together and go in, praying all the while. I try to learn something before I go in. I try to show some respect of the place I'm going into.

Next to dressing for a rout or ball, undressing is a woe.

I don't give parties, and I'm not in that social scene. I couldn't care less.

Coquettes are, but too rare. It is a career that requires great abilities, infinite pains, a gay and airy spirit. 'T is the coquette who provides all the amusements,--suggests the riding-party, plans the picnic, gives and guesses charades, acts them. She is the stirring element amid the heavy congeries of social atoms,--the soul of the house, the salt of the banquet.