Calvin Trillin Quotes

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

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

Everybody is who he was in high school.

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

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.

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

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

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

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?

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 . . . .

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?

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.

There's always a source for humor.

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

Kerr's Three Rules for a Successful College: Have plenty of football for the alumni, sex for the students, and parking for the faculty. If law school is so hard to get through, how come there are so many lawyers?

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.

There is no question that Rumanian-Jewish food is heavy. One meal is equal in heaviness, I would guess, to eight or nine years of steady mung-bean eating.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

Although I grew up in Kansas City, ... I have always kept more or less au courant of Texas barbecue, like a sports fan who is almost monomaniacally obsessed with basketball but glances over at the N.H.L. standings now and then.

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.

How did Italy manage to end up with no Caribbean islands at all? Christopher Columbus took the trouble to discover the Caribbean personally before the end of the fifteenth century. Try to get a decent plate of spaghetti there now.

As part of my research for An Anthology of Authors' Atrocity Stories About Publishers, I conducted a study (employing my usual controls) that showed the average shelf life of a trade book to be somewhere between milk and yoghurt.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

Everything was blamed on Castro. Mudslides in California. The fact that you can't buy a decent tomato anymore. Was there an exceptionally high pollen count in Massapequa, Long Island, one day? It was Castro, exporting sneezes.

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.

"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."

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.

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.