Calvin Trillin Quotes - Page 4

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 . . . .

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

There is no question that Rumanian-Jewish food is heavy. One meal is equal in heaviness, I would guess, to eight or nine years of steady mung-bean eating.

People, not just reporters, are more interested in politics than in government, so the actual issues wouldn't be something that interested them.

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

Irving Wallace family - they have preservatives.

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

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.

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?

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?

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.

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?

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'?

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?

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?