Calvin Trillin Quotes
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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 . . . .
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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.'
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Anybody caught selling macrame in public should be dyed a natural color and hung out to dry.
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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?
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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.
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As far as I'm concerned, 'whom' is a word that was invented to make everyone sound like a butler.
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If it's inappropriate to write about, if there's nothing funny about it, then it's not funny.
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Did you know that five out of three people have trouble with fractions.
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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.
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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.
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The Banh Mi sandwich is really the only good argument for colonialism.
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The ceiling on taxation of capital gains reflects the national belief that speculation is a more worthwhile way to make a living than work.
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What interests me is what you might call vernacular writing, writing that connects you to a place.
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"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."
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Do my ears deceive me, or can I actually hear the sounds of worms turning? You say a turning worm makes no sound? But how about a chorus of turning worms?
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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.
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Avoid restaurants with names that are improbable descriptions, such as the Purple Goose, the Blue Kangaroo or the Quilted Orangutan.
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The price of purity is purists.
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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.
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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!
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Following the Romanian tradition, garlic is used in excess to keep the vampires away.
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Everybody is who he was in high school.
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I never did very well in math - I could never seem to persuade the teacher that I hadn't meant my answers literally.
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Irving Wallace family - they have preservatives.
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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.
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There's always a source for humor.
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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.
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It was a given in our family that my father was a grocer so that I wouldn't have to be.
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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.
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Money not spent on a luxury one considered even briefly is the equivalent of windfall income and should be spent accordingly.
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