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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Every good idea sooner or later degenerates into hard work.

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

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!

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.

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

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

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.

Since nostaglia is fueled by inflation, could it be that inflation is the result of a conspiracy by the people who are trying to palm off McGovern buttons and Howdy Doody puppets and their Aunt Thelma's toaster as antiques.

Given the clientele, the restaurants on Capri might resemble those fancy Northern Italian places on the East Side of Manhattan where the captain has taken bilingual sneering lessons from the maitre d' at the French joint down the street and the waiter, whose father was born in Palermo, would deny under torture that tomato sauce has ever touched his lips.

I suppose that there are endeavors in which self-confidence is even more important than it is in writing -- tightrope walking comes immediately to mind -- but it's difficult for me to think of anybody producing much writing if his confidence is completely shot.

By the way, did you fellows know that a hummingbird weighs as much as a quarter? Do you think a hummingbird also weighs the same as two dimes and a nickel? But then she asked a question of her own: How do they weigh a hummingbird?

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.

There's always a source for humor [in politics]. If it's inappropriate to write about, if there's nothing funny about it, then it's not funny. So it sort of selects itself. It has to. And plus, often something that wouldn't be funny at the time is okay to make jokes about later.

The interesting thing about class warfare is that it's only class warfare if it's up, not down. If you talk about welfare cheats or something, that's not class warfare because it's down; you have to talk about rich people before it's class warfare.

I've decided to skip 'holistic'. I don't know what it means, and I don't want to know. That may seem extreme, but I followed the same strategy toward 'Gestalt' and the 'Twist', and lived to tell the tale.

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.

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

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.

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

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?

It happens to be a matter of record that I was first in print with the discovery that the tastelessness of the food offered in American clubs varies in direct proportion to the exclusiveness of the club.

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

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

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

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.

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

Marriage is part of a sort of 50′s revival package that's back in vogue along with neckties and naked ambition.

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

The price of purity is purists.

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

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.

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

Getting a tattoo would probably make me cry.

Why in the world are you a Republican?

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?

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

There's always a source for humor.