Calvin Trillin Quotes

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.

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

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 his article is still on the presses.

Every good idea sooner or later degenerates into hard work.

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

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

There is a theory that sooner or later anything in America that is any fun at all will be ruined by people from California.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.'

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!

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.

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

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.

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.

The price of purity is purists.

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

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.