Calvin Trillin Quotations

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

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

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.

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

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

Getting a tattoo would probably make me cry.

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

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.'

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I don't mind being interviewed on television or radio.

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

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

Perhaps we've time to have a look at the Number Thirty-One bus queue before we turn in.

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

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

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?

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?

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

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

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

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

Everybody is who he was in high school.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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 . . . .

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

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?

Why in the world are you a Republican?

The price of purity is purists.

Was the Buffalo chicken wing invented when Teressa Bellissimo thought of splitting it in half and deep frying it and serving it with celery and blue-cheese dressing? Was it invented when John Young started using mambo sauce and thought of elevating wings into a specialty?

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'?

"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."

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.

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

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.

Irving Wallace family - they have preservatives.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Since nostaglia is fueled by inflation, could it be that inflation is the result of a conspiracy by the people who are trying to palm off McGovern buttons and Howdy Doody puppets and their Aunt Thelma's toaster as antiques.

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?

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.

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?

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

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

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.

There's always a source for humor.

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.

Health food makes me sick.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

Every good idea sooner or later degenerates into hard work.

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.

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.

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

Obliviously On He Sails: The Bush Administration in Rhyme.

It isn't like when John died, when there were a lot of people there. I think this time she wanted to do it more by herself. Somebody told me there's an African blessing, 'May we be buried by our children.' It's obviously the hardest loss.

Ross begat Shawn. He handed down the crown of St Peter to Shawn.

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.

The best restaurants in the world are, of course, in Kansas City.

I don't mind being compared to Tolstoy literarily, but when it comes to Fun Stats it's a little humiliating.