Best Calvin Trillin Quotes

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

Calvin Trillin

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

Calvin Trillin

#3. The price of purity is purists.

Calvin Trillin

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

Calvin Trillin

#5. Getting a tattoo would probably make me cry.

Calvin Trillin

#6. 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

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

Calvin Trillin

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. Everybody is who he was in high school.

Calvin Trillin

#11. 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

#12. 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?

Calvin Trillin

#13. She wanted to protect us from worry, from sadness, from loneliness
things her parents had not been able to protect her from. (About Alice)

Calvin Trillin

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

Calvin Trillin

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

Calvin Trillin

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. 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

#19. 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.

Calvin Trillin

#20. 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.

Calvin Trillin

#21. 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

#22. In the early sixties, the notion that racism was not acceptable even in certain regions or certain clubs or certain circumstances - the notion that it could not be treated with moderation - was a notion largely confined to black people.

Calvin Trillin

#23. 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

#24. She believed in the principle of enoughness."
from "About Alice

Calvin Trillin

#25. 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.

Calvin Trillin

#26. 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

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

Calvin Trillin

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

Calvin Trillin

#29. 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

#30. Your children are either the center of your life or they're not, and the rest is commentary

Calvin Trillin

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

Calvin Trillin

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

Calvin Trillin

#33. 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

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

Calvin Trillin

#35. Daddy, how come in Kansas City the bagels taste like just round bread?

Calvin Trillin

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

Calvin Trillin