Top 100 Calvin Trillin Quotes
#1. According to Harold Fleming, for instance, who was then director of the Southern Regional Council, a small Atlanta hotbed of what he now calls "premature integrationists," a moderate was "a white man without sidearms.
Calvin Trillin
#2. 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
#4. Long Island is the single most segregated suburban area in the United States.
Calvin Trillin
#5. I've written three books you could think of as memoirs.
Calvin Trillin
#6. Math was always my bad subject. I couldn't convince my teachers that many of my answers were meant ironically.
Calvin Trillin
#7. 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.
Calvin Trillin
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. Paull has his own style, which is folksy, not canned.
Religion? He's got one. His prophet's Ayn Rand.
By Rand's eerie theories he's fervently gripped,
So he won't do flip-flops. He long ago flipped.
Calvin Trillin
#11. As far as I'm concerned, 'whom' is a word that was invented to make everyone sound like a butler.
Calvin Trillin
#12. Every good idea sooner or later degenerates into hard work.
Calvin Trillin
#14. The existential paradox we all experience; we feel that we are immortal, yet we know that we will die.
Calvin Trillin
#15. 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
#16. I've always thought that parallel parking was my main talent.
Calvin Trillin
#17. Marriage is not merely sharing the fettucini, but sharing the burden of finding the fettucini restaurant in the first place.
Calvin Trillin
#18. 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
#19. Taking pleasure in the dark side may be some sort of occupational hazard for reporters.
Calvin Trillin
#20. The naked statement - a black man has been killed by a white policeman - is such a fearsome divider of the races that the people who preside over a city immediately try to cover it with details.
Calvin Trillin
#21. 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
#22. 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.
Calvin Trillin
#23. 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
#24. Perhaps we've time to have a look at the Number Thirty-One bus queue before we turn in.
Calvin Trillin
#25. Many Texas barbecue fanatics have a strong belief in the beneficial properties of accumulated grease.
Calvin Trillin
#26. 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!
Calvin Trillin
#27. I never eat in a restaurant that's over a hundred feet off the ground and won't stand still.
Calvin Trillin
#28. I am firmly committed to the proposition that whoever is in power is exceedingly silly ... And that goes for the opposition as well.
Calvin Trillin
#29. I like chili, but not enough to discuss it with someone from Texas.
Calvin Trillin
#30. 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
#31. I'm more disturbed when people expect me to be serious.
Calvin Trillin
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. At American weddings, the quality of the food is in inverse proportion to the social position of the bride and groom.
Calvin Trillin
#37. 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
#38. 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.
Calvin Trillin
#39. I don't think I've ever read a food piece or a food book.
Calvin Trillin
#40. 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
#41. 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.
Calvin Trillin
#42. 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
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. It was a given in our family that my father was a grocer so that I wouldn't have to be.
Calvin Trillin
#47. Canadians are very well behaved, they don't throw their food.
Calvin Trillin
#48. 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
#49. If it's inappropriate to write about, if there's nothing funny about it, then it's not funny.
Calvin Trillin
#50. "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
#51. Being on a book tour is a lot easier than reporting.
Calvin Trillin
#52. Anybody who doesn't think that the best hamburger place in teh world is in his home town is a sissy.
Calvin Trillin
#53. 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
#55. I don't cook. I don't know anything about food. I've never reviewed a restaurant.
Calvin Trillin
#57. What interests me is what you might call vernacular writing, writing that connects you to a place.
Calvin Trillin
#59. Keeping off a large weight loss is a phenomenon about as common in American medicine as an impoverished dermatologist.
Calvin Trillin
#60. Daddy, how come in Kansas City the bagels taste like just round bread?
Calvin Trillin
#61. Money not spent on a luxury one considered even briefly is the equivalent of windfall income and should be spent accordingly.
Calvin Trillin
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. Your children are either the center of your life or they're not, and the rest is commentary
Calvin Trillin
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. I don't mind being interviewed on television or radio.
Calvin Trillin
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. She believed in the principle of enoughness."
from "About Alice
Calvin Trillin
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. If law school is so hard to get through ... how come there are so many lawyers?
Calvin Trillin
#77. 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
#78. What campaigns are for is weeding out the people who, for one way or another, weren't making it for the long haul.
Calvin Trillin
#79. 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
#80. With humor, it's so subjective that trying to think of what the ideal reader would think would drive you crazy.
Calvin Trillin
#81. The Banh Mi sandwich is really the only good argument for colonialism.
Calvin Trillin
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. School plays were invented partly to give parents and easy opportunity to demonstrate their priorities.
Calvin Trillin
#85. 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
#86. Avoid restaurants with names that are improbable descriptions, such as the Purple Goose, the Blue Kangaroo or the Quilted Orangutan.
Calvin Trillin
#87. When you're writing, you are robbed of your delivery.
Calvin Trillin
#88. 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
#89. The margin of error in astrology is plus or minus one hundred percent.
Calvin Trillin
#90. 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
#91. Anybody caught selling macrame in public should be dyed a natural color and hung out to dry.
Calvin Trillin
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. I do remember in high school I wanted to be a disc jockey.
Calvin Trillin
#95. Following the Romanian tradition, garlic is used in excess to keep the vampires away.
Calvin Trillin
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. When it comes to rapacious 19th century capitalism, my family's hands are clean.
Calvin Trillin
#100. 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
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