Calvin Trillin Quotes

I never eat in a restaurant that's over a hundred feet off the ground and won't stand still.

Many Texas barbecue fanatics have a strong belief in the beneficial properties of accumulated grease.

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.

The shelf life of the average trade book is somewhere between milk and yogurt.

As far as I'm concerned, 'whom' is a word that was invented to make everyone sound like a butler.

Perhaps we've time to have a look at the Number Thirty-One bus queue before we turn in.

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.

Every good idea sooner or later degenerates into hard work.

Did you know that five out of three people have trouble with fractions.

I never did very well in math - I could never seem to persuade the teacher that I hadn't meant my answers literally.

Math was always my bad subject. I couldn't convince my teachers that many of my answers were meant ironically.

I like chili, but not enough to discuss it with someone from Texas.

Avoid restaurants with names that are improbable descriptions, such as the Purple Goose, the Blue Kangaroo or the Quilted Orangutan.

When someone reaches middle age, people he knows begin to get put in charge of things, and knowing what he knows about the people who are being put in charge of things scares the hell out of him.

The way I read Billy Carter's testimony, he was a model citizen himself until the voters went and ruined his life by making his brother President.

A new regulation for the publishing industry: "The advance for a book must be larger than the check for the lunch at which it was discussed.

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.

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.

The margin of error in astrology is plus or minus one hundred percent.

If law school is so hard to get through... how come there are so many lawyers?

There is a theory that sooner or later anything in America that is any fun at all will be ruined by people from California.

Marriage is not merely sharing the fettucini, but sharing the burden of finding the fettucini restaurant in the first place.

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.

The price of purity is purists.

I do remember in high school I wanted to be a disc jockey.

Following the Romanian tradition, garlic is used in excess to keep the vampires away.

The Banh Mi sandwich is really the only good argument for colonialism.

Health food makes me sick.

There's always a source for humor.

"Law professors were never like economics professors," a Harvard Law professor told me. "If you disagreed with someone, you didn't call him a fool."

If it's inappropriate to write about, if there's nothing funny about it, then it's not funny.

The ceiling on taxation of capital gains reflects the national belief that speculation is a more worthwhile way to make a living than work.

Why in the world are you a Republican?

What interests me is what you might call vernacular writing, writing that connects you to a place.

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.

Getting a tattoo would probably make me cry.

What campaigns are for is weeding out the people who, for one way or another, weren't making it for the long haul.

At American weddings, the quality of the food is in inverse proportion to the social position of the bride and groom.

Sometimes, if I had until the next day to turn the story in, I'd head home, finding that the knot in the narrative came loose with the rhythmic clacking of the subway train.

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.

When you're writing, you are robbed of your delivery.

Irving Wallace family - they have preservatives.

Taking pleasure in the dark side may be some sort of occupational hazard for reporters.

The average trade book has a shelf life of between milk and yogurt, except for books by any member of the Irving Wallace family - they have preservatives.

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 care where I sit, as long as I get fed.

One advantage of a monarchy is that a monarchy does not suffer the effects of having great clots of white Christians moping around simply because they aren't the king or queen.

If General Haig is so smart, why did he finish 214th (out of 310) in his graduating class at West Point? Does that mean there are 213 generals his age who are smarter than he is?

Everybody is who he was in high school.

I've written three books you could think of as memoirs.