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Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Calvin Trillin Quotes

The shelf life of the average trade book is somewhere between milk and yogurt.

– Calvin Trillin

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

– Calvin Trillin

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

– 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

Getting a tattoo would probably make me cry.

– Calvin Trillin

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

– Calvin Trillin

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

– Calvin Trillin

Health food makes me sick.

– Calvin Trillin

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

– 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 don’t cook. I don’t know anything about food. I’ve never reviewed a restaurant.

– Calvin Trillin

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

– 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

With humor, it’s so subjective that trying to think of what the ideal reader would think would drive you crazy.

– Calvin Trillin

There’s always a source for humor.

– Calvin Trillin

When you’re writing, you are robbed of your delivery.

– 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

When it comes to rapacious 19th century capitalism, my family’s hands are clean.

– 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

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

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

– 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

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

– 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

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

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