Calvin Trillin Quotes (21 Quotes)

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

Obliviously On He Sails The Bush Administration in Rhyme.

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 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.

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

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 the article is still on the presses

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.

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.

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?

Health food makes me sick.

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

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

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.

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.

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