Calvin Trillin
The most remarkable thing about my mother is that for thirty years she served the family nothing but leftovers. The original meal has never been found.Collection: Food
I never eat in a restaurant that's over a hundred feet off the ground and won't stand still.Collection: Food
I actually think of being funny as an odd turn of mind, like a mild disability, some weird way of looking at the world that you can't get rid of.Collection: Funny
With humor, it's so subjective that trying to think of what the ideal reader would think would drive you crazy.Collection: Humor
There's always a source for humor.Collection: Humor
Health food makes me sick.Collection: Diet
I never did very well in math - I could never seem to persuade the teacher that I hadn't meant my answers literally.Collection: Teacher
As far as I'm concerned, 'whom' is a word that was invented to make everyone sound like a butler.Collection: Funny
I'm more disturbed when people expect me to be serious.
We all know funny people who can't get it down on the page - even funny writers who can't get it down on the page.
The shelf life of the average trade book is somewhere between milk and yogurt.
People, not just reporters, are more interested in politics than in government, so the actual issues wouldn't be something that interested them.
I don't cook. I don't know anything about food. I've never reviewed a restaurant.
I do remember in high school I wanted to be a disc jockey.
The food in such places is so tasteless because the members associate spices and garlic with just the sort of people they're trying to keep out.
The question about those aromatic advertisements that perfume companies are having stitched into magazines these days is this: under the freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment, is smelling up the place a constitutionally protected form of expression?
When you're writing, you are robbed of your delivery.
When it comes to Chinese food I have always operated under the policy that the less known about the preparation the better. A wise diner who is invited to visit the kitchen replies by saying, as politely as possible, that he has a pressing engagement elsewhere.
What campaigns are for is weeding out the people who, for one way or another, weren't making it for the long haul.
I've written three books you could think of as memoirs.
Being on a book tour is a lot easier than reporting.
I don't mind being interviewed on television or radio.
When it comes to rapacious 19th century capitalism, my family's hands are clean.
You know, I used to say, when people say, 'How do you think about what to write about in the poems every week?' And I say, 'Well, I have to turn it in on Monday, so on Sunday nights I turn the shower to iambic pentameter and it sort of works out that way.'
If it's inappropriate to write about, if there's nothing funny about it, then it's not funny.
Canadians are very well behaved, they don't throw their food.
I don't think I've ever read a food piece or a food book.
What interests me is what you might call vernacular writing, writing that connects you to a place.
Getting a tattoo would probably make me cry.
I've always thought that parallel parking was my main talent.
Many Texas barbecue fanatics have a strong belief in the beneficial properties of accumulated grease.Collection: Strong
Every good idea sooner or later degenerates into hard work.Collection: Hard Work
In modern America, anyone who attempts to write satirically about the events of the day finds it difficult to concoct a situation so bizarre that it may not actually come to pass while his article is still on the presses.Collection: Writing
If law school is so hard to get through... how come there are so many lawyers?Collection: Funny
Math was always my bad subject. I couldn't convince my teachers that many of my answers were meant ironically.Collection: Teacher
Did you know that five out of three people have trouble with fractions.Collection: People
Following the Romanian tradition, garlic is used in excess to keep the vampires away.Collection: Vampire
Anybody caught selling macrame in public should be dyed a natural color and hung out to dry.Collection: Color
Even today, well-brought-up English girls are taught by their mothers to boil all veggies for at least a month and a half, just in case one of the dinner guests turns up without his teeth.Collection: Girl
I like chili, but not enough to discuss it with someone from Texas.Collection: Texas
Marriage is not merely sharing the fettucini, but sharing the burden of finding the fettucini restaurant in the first place.Collection: Firsts
I'm in favor of liberalizing immigration because of the effect it would have on restaurants. I'd let just about everybody in except the English.Collection: Immigration
There is a theory that sooner or later anything in America that is any fun at all will be ruined by people from California.Collection: Fun
When helicopters were snatching people from the grounds of the American embassy compound during the panic of the final Vietcong push into Saigon, I was sitting in front of the television set shouting, Get the chefs! Get the chefs!Collection: People
I don't care where I sit, as long as I get fed.Collection: Long
The talk shows are stuffed full of sufferers who have regained their health--congressmen who suffered through a serious spell of boozing and skirt-chasing, White House aides who were stricken cruelly with overweening ambition, movie stars and baseball players who came down with acute cases of wanting to trash hotel rooms while under the influence of recreational drugs. Most of them have found God, or at least a publisher.Collection: Baseball
Following the Rumanian tradition, garlic is used in excess to keep the vampires away... Following the Jewish tradition, a dispenser of schmaltz (liquid chicken fat) is kept on the table to give the vampires heartburn if they get through the garlic defense.Collection: Jewish Tradition
The price of purity is purists.Collection: Purity
Fairs are good places to eat, particularly for stand-up eaters--which is one of the kinds of eaters I am, although when I eat standing up away from home I sometimes miss the familiar cool breeze coming from the open refrigerator.Collection: Home
It has long been acknowledged that the single best restaurant in the world is Arthur Bryant's Barbecue at Eighteenth and Booklyn in Kansas city.Collection: Cities