Best 87 quotes of Calvin Trillin on MyQuotes

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

Being on a book tour is a lot easier than reporting.

Did you know that five out of three people have trouble with fractions.

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?

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.

Every good idea sooner or later degenerates into hard work.

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.

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.

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

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.

Getting a tattoo would probably make me cry.

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.

Health food makes me sick.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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?

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?

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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'?

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

Kerr's Three Rules for a Successful College: Have plenty of football for the alumni, sex for the students, and parking for the faculty. If law school is so hard to get through, how come there are so many lawyers?

"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.

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

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

Marriage is part of a sort of 50′s revival package that's back in vogue along with neckties and naked ambition.