Trillin Quotes

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. ~ Calvin Trillin

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? ~ Calvin Trillin

Reporters also tend to love trials. It may be that we are transfixed by a process in which the person being asked a question actually has to answer it. He cannot say he would rather not comment. He cannot tell an anecdote on a different subject. He has to answer the question - under oath that he is telling the truth. ~ Calvin Trillin

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? ~ Calvin Trillin

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

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

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. ~ Calvin Trillin

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

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

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

I focus on the endless treetops scrapin' the sunset into gooey colors, the birds trillin' and fussin' at our departure. I close my eyes for a second, breathin' in deep to make serious memories, the kind that sick forever. ~ Emily Murdoch

Because a superior fried-chicken restaurant is often the institutional extension of a single chicken-obsessed woman, I realize that, like a good secondhand bookstore or a bad South American dictatorship, it is not easily passed down intact. ~ Calvin Trillin

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.' ~ Calvin Trillin

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. ~ Calvin Trillin

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

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

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

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

IT WAS CUSTOMARY in the South for outside observers to interpret events in terms of ideology (usually racial ideology) and for local observers to interpret the same events in terms of money (usually graft). ~ Calvin Trillin

For Alice, of course, the measure of how you held up in the face of a life-threatening illness was not how much you changed but how much you stayed the same, in control of your own identity. ~ Calvin Trillin

Every good idea sooner or later degenerates into hard work. ~ Calvin Trillin

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. ~ Calvin Trillin

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

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

Getting a tattoo would probably make me cry. ~ Calvin Trillin

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

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? ~ Calvin Trillin

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

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. ~ Calvin Trillin

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

Would I be commenting on Amy Fisher?
Was that the sort of subject that someone who hoped to become poet laureate should discuss? Would those British laureates who had traditionally written about royal birthdays and royal jubilees have dealt with such goings on? ~ Calvin Trillin

Being on a book tour is a lot easier than reporting. ~ Calvin Trillin

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

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. ~ Calvin Trillin

I suppose it's possible that the Sundance Kid didn't like to make much of his birthdays - they may have struck him as just another reminder that his draw was getting slower by the year - but what if he truly liked a major celebration? What if he looked forward every year to marking the day of his birth with what they used to call in the West 'a real wingding, with pink balloons and a few survivors'? ~ Calvin Trillin

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

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

All White House hopefuls we forewarn:
You'll have to prove that you were born.
Before Trump hits the state of granite,
He must identify the planet
Where he first took on human form -
A place where blowhards are the norm. ~ Calvin Trillin

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

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. ~ Calvin Trillin

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

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

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

Someone who managed to navigate the tricky waters between living a life you could be proud of and still delighting in the many things there are to take pleasure in. ~ Calvin Trillin

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

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. ~ Calvin Trillin

There's always a source for humor. ~ Calvin Trillin

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. ~ Calvin Trillin

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. ~ Calvin Trillin

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. ~ Calvin Trillin

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. ~ Calvin Trillin

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

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

Health food makes me sick. ~ Calvin Trillin

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

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

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

No sophisticated study of public opinion is needed to establish the fact that in the United States, North or South, a white life is considered to be of more value than a Negro life. ~ Calvin Trillin

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

In the rather informal survey I have taken over the years on intensity of interest in food by profession, lawyers rank only a few trades below concert pianists ... ~ Calvin Trillin

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

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. ~ Calvin Trillin

Why in the world are you a Republican? ~ Calvin Trillin

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

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. ~ Calvin Trillin

Everybody is who he was in high school. ~ Calvin Trillin

"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." ~ Calvin Trillin

Among married couples the person who actually makes out the mortgage check is likely to be more cautious about spending money than the person who doesn't. There is something sobering about sending away that much money every month in the knowledge that, rain or shine, you'll have to come up with the same amount of money the next month and the month after that. ~ Calvin Trillin

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. ~ Calvin Trillin

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

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. ~ Calvin Trillin

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

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

Before I was born [my father] wanted me to go specifically to Yale, which he thought would help. It was easy for him to think I could be president: he didn't have to worry about being president himself, being ineligible because he wasn't born in the United States. ~ Calvin Trillin

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

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 ... ~ Calvin Trillin

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. ~ Calvin Trillin

The average trade book has a shelf life of between milk and yogurt, except for books by any member of the Irving Wallace family - they have preservatives. ~ Calvin Trillin

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

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