Best 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do my ears deceive me, or can I actually hear the sounds of worms turning? You say a turning worm makes no sound? But how about a chorus of turning worms? — Calvin Trillin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Everybody is who he was in high school. — Calvin Trillin

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

Your children are either the center of your life or they're not, and the rest is commentary — Calvin Trillin

But my subconscious mind
the part I've heard writers call the lizard brain
could and did: it told me to reach for Anne Lamott or Edith Wharton or Calvin Trillin instead. And if I've learned one thing in my decades on earth, it's this: Don't argue with your lizard brain; it knows you better than you know yourself. — Sara Nelson

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

Why in the world are you a Republican? — 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