Calvin Trillin Quotes & Sayings

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

Every good idea sooner or later degenerates into hard work. — Calvin Trillin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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. — Calvin Trillin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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? — Calvin Trillin

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

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

The existential paradox we all experience; we feel that we are immortal, yet we know that we will die. — Calvin Trillin

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

Being on a book tour is a lot easier than reporting. — Calvin Trillin

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. — 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

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

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

School plays were invented partly to give parents and easy opportunity to demonstrate their priorities. — 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

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

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

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

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

The margin of error in astrology is plus or minus one hundred percent. — Calvin Trillin

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

Why in the world are you a Republican? — Calvin Trillin

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

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'? — Calvin Trillin

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

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

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

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

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

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

Health food makes me sick. — Calvin Trillin

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

Daddy, how come in Kansas City the bagels taste like just round bread? — Calvin Trillin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"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

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

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

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

Do you think the people you preach to have a feeling of love?" the young man asked. "Well, I'm not talking about weak love," King explained. "I'm talking about love with justice. Weak love can be sentimental and empty. I'm talking about the love that is strong, so that you love your fellow men enough to lead them to justice. — Calvin Trillin

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

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. — Calvin Trillin

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

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

Among married couples the person who actually makes out the mortgage check is likely to be more cautious about spending money than the person who doesn't. There is something sobering about sending away that much money every month in the knowledge that, rain or shine, you'll have to come up with the same amount of money the next month and the month after that. — Calvin Trillin

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

I've always thought that parallel parking was my main talent. — Calvin Trillin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Going out? Are you going out? He's not going out? What do you mean he's not going out? Are you out here because you're still mad that they moved the Dodgers to L.A.? Are you going out or not? You're not going out? I guess you're not going out - huh? You mean go out parking in the evenings? Are you going out to park? Mr. Tepper, he asked at one point, did you ever - if you were in the middle of an interesting story in the paper or perhaps an interesting conversation with somebody who dropped in to talk to you while you were parking - notice that the meter had run out and therefore go out and put more money in the meter? If we're both keeping an eye out, what does it hurt? — Calvin Trillin

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. — Calvin Trillin

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

Getting a tattoo would probably make me cry. — Calvin Trillin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There's always a source for humor. — Calvin Trillin

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