Calvin Trillin

Calvin Trillin

27 quotes

Biography

Calvin Marshall Trillin is an American journalist, humorist, food writer, poet, memoirist and novelist. He is a winner of the Thurber Prize for American Humor (2012) and an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2008).

"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

"There's always a source for humor."

Calvin Trillin

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

Calvin Trillin

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

Calvin Trillin

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

Calvin Trillin

"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

"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

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

Calvin Trillin

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

Calvin Trillin

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

Calvin Trillin

"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

"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

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

Calvin Trillin

"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

"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

"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

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

Calvin Trillin

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

Calvin Trillin

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

Calvin Trillin

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

Calvin Trillin

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

Calvin Trillin

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

Calvin Trillin

"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

"...the existential paradox we all experience; we feel that we are immortal, yet we know that we will die."

Calvin Trillin

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

Calvin Trillin