Calvin Trillin quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Calvin Trillin

Calvin Trillin Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Calvin Trillin on Wise Famous Quotes.

The existential paradox we all experience; we feel that we are immortal, yet we know that we will die.

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

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

It was a given in our family that my father was a grocer so that I wouldn't have to be.

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.

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

Once, in Lisbon, I tried my best to work the phone book in a way that would assuage a longing [Alice and I] had for certain Chinese dishes ...

With humor, it's so subjective that trying to think of what the ideal reader would think would drive you crazy.

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

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

Anybody who doesn't think that the best hamburger place in teh world is in his home town is a sissy.

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

Long Island is the single most segregated suburban area in the United States.

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.

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

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

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.

Your children are either the center of your life or they're not, and the rest is commentary

She believed in the principle of enoughness."
from "About Alice

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

Canadians are very well behaved, they don't throw their food.

JACKSON HAS NEVER stood apart from the rest of Mississippi the way Atlanta has stood apart from Georgia, say, or New Orleans from Louisiana.

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

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.

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.

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

The price of purity is purists.

I don't mind being interviewed on television or radio.

People, not just reporters, are more interested in politics than in government, so the actual issues wouldn't be something that interested them.

Everybody is who he was in high school.

There's always a source for humor.

Keeping off a large weight loss is a phenomenon about as common in American medicine as an impoverished dermatologist.

Daddy, how come in Kansas City the bagels taste like just round bread?

When it comes to rapacious 19th century capitalism, my family's hands are clean.

"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."

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.

Health food makes me sick.

I don't cook. I don't know anything about food. I've never reviewed a restaurant.

If Lincoln freed the slaves and preserved the Union, how come
'Lincolnesque' just means tall?

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

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

If bumblebee leavings and stump paste are so good for you, why can't any of those guys (in the health stores) grow full beards?

I'm more disturbed when people expect me to be serious.

Money not spent on a luxury one considered even briefly is the equivalent of windfall income and should be spent accordingly.

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

I am firmly committed to the proposition that whoever is in power is exceedingly silly ... And that goes for the opposition as well.

Anybody caught selling macrame in public should be dyed a natural color and hung out to dry.

Why in the world are you a Republican?

I've always thought that parallel parking was my main talent.

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

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

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

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

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

Every good idea sooner or later degenerates into hard work.

I don't think I've ever read a food piece or a food book.

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.

Being on a book tour is a lot easier than reporting.

She wanted to protect us from worry, from sadness, from loneliness
things her parents had not been able to protect her from. (About Alice)

Getting a tattoo would probably make me cry.

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

School plays were invented partly to give parents and easy opportunity to demonstrate their priorities.

I don't care where I sit, as long as I get fed.

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