Top 95 Quotes & Sayings by Calvin Trillin

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

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

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

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.

Getting a tattoo would probably make me cry.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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 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.

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

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.

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?

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

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

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

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.'

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

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

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.

There's always a source for humor.

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

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

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

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.

Every good idea sooner or later degenerates into hard work.

Why in the world are you a Republican?

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Everybody is who he was in high school.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

The price of purity is purists.

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

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.

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

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.

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