Calvin Trillin Quotes

43 Sourced Quotes

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

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
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
The shelf life of the modern hardback writer is somewhere between the milk and the yoghurt.

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

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

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
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.

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

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

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
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.

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

Calvin Trillin
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?

Calvin Trillin
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.

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
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
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?

Calvin Trillin
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.

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
I've heard it argued that, absent some slippage in management, a barbecue restaurant can only get better over time: many Texas barbecue fanatics have a strong belief in the beneficial properties of accumulated grease.

Calvin Trillin
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.

Calvin Trillin