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The coffee shop is a great New York institution, but it has terrible coffee. And the more traditional coffee shops are trying to catch up with more sophisticated coffee drinkers.
Oct 1, 2025
The regrets I have are so minor. You know, would I leave my Keith Richards hat, with the silver skull on it, on the stool at the coffee shop at LaGuardia? I wouldn't do that again. But overall, no, I don't have any regrets.
I've always played music because it just feels right and have been grateful for everything I have and the shows that I play. Even when I was playing coffee shops; it's how its always been.
I never played coffee shops; I just played a lot of coffee shop-sized venues. I took every venue I could get my hands on.
I write both at home and at coffee shops, and I have a terrible work ethic - I have a tendency to write most of my books right before the deadline. I'm trying to work on that, but so far, I'm not getting any more organized.
I spend a lot of time loathing the sentences that I put down on the page. Once I'm past that phase, it doesn't really matter what the routine is (coffee shop, someone else's house, my dining room table), I'm pretty fast. I go back to the start of whatever I'm working on, every half hour or so, and revise my way back to where I left off. I have my headphones on, I'm checking email, I look at Twitter and Tumblr, and drink a lot of coffee. I need a lot of distraction to work.
It's not sufficient in the internet age to communicate through the media; you have to be able to do it on the ground, door by door, coffee shop by coffee shop, shop floor by shop floor. You really have to do that as well.
I'm kind of a creature of the alt-weekly universe - my real education into higher culture was acquired in coffee shops, reading those papers, digging into that lively mishmash of opinion for drift, a sense of what to see, what to hear, what to read, etc. - and I'd like to think that scene's still vital, although I understand there's been a fair amount of conglomerating, which would seem to undercut its radical roots, its funky local flavor. I'd encourage any writer with an eye for life and an ear for prose to give it a try. You can work out your chops just fine in newsprint.
Today we no longer live in a way that is constrained by simple working or leisure environments - we travel, we work on laptops in coffee shops, we go out to dinner straight from work.
I used to write in a local coffee shop, but there was another guy, another writer, who kept sitting in my favorite seat. I would show up, and he would be there, and I would get exiled to a couch or something, and it would throw me off my game.
When you only hang out with performers, you start to feel like movies and TV and comedy is everything. Especially being in LA, where it feels like you walk into a coffee shop and you see 15 laptops with screenplays being written.
I listened so hard because it felt like, while she was telling me stories, she was massaging my soul, letting me know that I was not alone, that I will never have to be alone, that there are friends and family and churches and coffee shops. I was not going to be cast into space.
The free, creative, loving people who shine so brightly in my memory of studios and coffee shops have become models for a huge section of the population. If they in turn can just stay alive in the face of power and terror, they may become the decisive section.
If you're going to be a writer, you're going to write because you have to. It's not like other arts and not nearly as rewarding because it's a lot lonelier, and most of the time it's just you alone in a dark room or a coffee shop. But a lot of writers have to write because they're writing for themselves, so whether or not someone sees your work or not- they're still writing because they absolutely have to.
I go to coffee shops for my outlet. Which is just not healthy at all.
I think the best way to listen to my music is through recording. I would love to be one of those artists where you can go into a coffee shop and watch people pass by and then my music is in their ears. Not necessarily a sensory deprivation thing, but that's cool too. Unfortunately in order to focus on nobody else, you would probably have to go into a dark room and just sit there and listen to it.
I'm kind of feeling like I don't mind being open with the random details of my life, like I'm at a coffee shop or my toe hurts or something, but obviously other more personal areas of life where I will just never really go there.
Let's say you're someone's phone, and you notice that your owner is drinking coffee at certain times of the day, just very subtly indicating where the local coffee shop is which happens to have paid, you know, whoever makes your phone at the right moment. I think we're in a future where frankly we are possibly facing little tiny bits of manipulation in all of our waking hours, if we don't have that already.
Always continue to perform no matter what or where the activity is: local theater, regional theater, local clubs or coffee shops. Continue to play the guitar or your instrument and always continue to progress or otherwise you will fail.
If you think your demeanor is mellow or not particularly charismatic, the material can life you higher. So write everyday, and get onstage or in a coffee shop where they are doing open mice, anywhere you can perform even if that means starting your own open mic night - and be your own self.
Sydney sighed and stood up, smoothing her rumpled clothes with dismay. ʺI need a coffee shop or something.ʺ ʺI think I saw one in a cave down the road,ʺ I said. That almost got a smile from her
I learned that Canadians are furious because Canada is exporting water to the United States. Their lakes are shrinking because they're selling water to the U.S. We water our golf courses and every ice cream shop and every coffee shop in the country because the health inspector has said you have to have a steady stream of water cleaning your spoons that you're frothing milk with and their ice cream scoopers. Are you kidding me? We're wasting all this water while we're sucking it from Canada and they're watching their lakes shrink?
That was sheer luck that it [being immersed into folk scene] happened when my voice began to develop. I don't know exactly what would have happened if I hadn't been alive and well and really lively in the Cambridge scene. But (the folk scene) was, and I fell into it absolutely naturally in the little coffee shops, and pretty soon it was Newport and then it was an overwhelming response internationally, actually.
Given enough coffee I could rule the world
I had a 2-week courtship with a fellow student in the fiction workshop in Iowa and a 5-minute wedding in a lawyer's office above the coffee shop where we'd been having lunch that day. And so I sent a cable to my father saying, 'By the time you get this, Daddy, I'll already be Mrs. Blaise!'
People who are busy doing things - as opposed to people who are busy sitting around, like me, reading and having coffee in coffee shops -don't have opportunities to kind of collect and organize their experiences and make sense of them.
Anything you're interested in the world whether it be Charlie rose or JetBlue or a public figure or your local coffee shop, they're on Twitter and broadcasting what is interesting to them.
I never lived the life of 'Oh, you're so good-looking'. People thought I was a girl when I was little, because I looked like a girl-maybe because my mother would keep my hair really long in a bowl cut. I was in a coffee shop once and the waitress was like, 'What do you want, Miss?' I was 10 or 11-the worst age to have that happen. I had a jean jacket on and a Metallica pin. I thought I was really cool.
In London I'm out and about all the time. I walk everywhere, so people do recognise me and they've probably seen me before so they're not bothered anymore. But I think that's a good thing because if you try and remain mysterious people are surprised when they see you. With me, I think they're just bored of seeing me - but that suits me just fine because I like to live as much of a normal life as I can. That's why I love living in London. People are very respectful of your privacy. If they see you having a coffee in a coffee shop, they're not going to interrupt you.
I don't leave my neighborhood. I don't go anywhere. There are four blocks I live in and there are two coffee shops, one at each end of the block... so I don't do much driving... Some people would say they never see me because I don't go anywhere. I stay in the blue state of Nashville, in my bubble.
The weirdest moments for me are in Los Angeles when I go to a mall that I've shopped at since I was 12, and now there's like, massive pictures of our faces everywhere, at my local coffee shops now there's these billboards of people wearing the T-shirts and stuff. It's very strange, but it's really exciting.
One of the best places for a shy person to meet people is in a coffee shop. If you are a reader, bring a book and read it there - that gives a guy something to ask you about. Same goes for sketching, writing, or any hobby you can take with you.
The Monmouth Coffee Shop is the best place in London
I got my first job when I moved to Los Angeles. I worked at a coffee shop for five years and it was one of the best experiences I ever had. It was a bunch of actors covering shifts for each other and becoming great friends.
Now anyone who has ever been on a blind date is well familiar with “The Moment”—that moment where you first walk into the bar or restaurant or coffee shop and scan the crowd and suddenly your heart stops and you say to yourself: oh, please—let it be him.
Contrary to popular belief, we (millennials) can't be won back with hipper worship bands, fancy coffee shops, or pastors who wear skinny jeans.
I worked at restaurants and coffee shops and babysitting and just whatever I could do to make money.
I really like to have a coffee shop next door and be able to smoke a cigarette. I'm a city person; I regard nature as something hostile and problematic. I do enjoy it when I get out there, but it is mostly against my will. It's a bit of an awkward thing to say - people really don't like it when you say that.
I usually write away from home, in coffee shops, on trains, on planes, in friends’ houses. I like places where there’s stuff going on that you can lift your eyes, see something interesting, overhear a conversation.
Who isn't crazy sometimes? Who hasn't driven around a block hoping a certain person will come out; who hasn't haunted a certain coffee shop, or stared obsessively at an old picture; who hasn't toiled over every word in a letter, taken four hours to write a two-sentence email, watched the phone praying it will ring; who doesn't lay awake at night sick with the image of her sleeping with someone else?
Travel is the art form available to Everyman. You sit in the coffee shop in a strange city and nobody knows who you are, or cares, and so you shed your checkered past and your motley credentials and you face the day unarmed ... And onward we go and some day in the distant future, we will stop and turn around in astonishment to see all the places we've been and the heroes we were.
If I go to the coffee shop and have a nice interaction with the barista, I don't know what that does for world peace, but we have to assume that in the great basket of goodness maybe that's one little micron or one little neutron that you've put in there.
There's this whole post-modern, nuevo beatnik, retro-bohemian thing going on, you know what I mean? You walk into some coffee shops, and it feels like you're an ex-patriot in Paris in the 20s. You're like, 'Hey, isn't that a young Ernest Hemingway over there? Yeah, I think it is! Hey, let's go have a look and see what he's writing... It's a Gap application.'
The coffee shop played a big role in Vienna of 1900. Rents were sky high, housing was difficult to come by, your apartment probably wasn't heated, and so you went to the coffee shop. You went to the coffee shop because it was warm, because it was great Viennese coffee, and you went for the conversation and the company.
You know what, maybe I just want a different kind of life. Maybe I want to open an antique store and coffee shop, and have a different kind of life.
I don't have any writing routine. Sometimes I go to my local coffee shop and I write there for some hours. Apart from that, I am traveling most of the time. I write in airports, trains, hotel rooms... I can write anywhere.
You'll need coffee shops and sunsets and road trips. Airplanes and passports and new songs and old songs, but people more than anything else. You will need other people and you will need to be that other person to someone else, a living breathing screaming invitation to believe better things.
And it doesn't matter to me whether you're running a coffee shop or you're an intellectual or you're in business or flying hot air balloons. People who can spread ideas, regardless of what those ideas are, win. But consumers, they got way more choices than they used to and way less time.
I like to walk around my neighborhood, late in the afternoon. I sometimes wind up at the wonderful, old Shell station that's been changed into a coffee shop. Right where Johnny used to change my oil, I have a latte and take out my little book bag. It doesn't sound very austere.
Nothing's going to keep me from making music. If I were in the want-ads in the back of the paper or playing to six people at a coffee shop, I'd still love to make music.