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.”

“Canadians are very well behaved, they don't throw their food.”

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

“Because a superior fried-chicken restaurant is often the institutional extension of a single chicken-obsessed woman, I realize that, like a good secondhand bookstore or a bad South American dictatorship, it is not easily passed down intact.”

“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.”

“What campaigns are for is weeding out the people who, for one way or another, weren't making it for the long haul.”

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

“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.'”

“Someone who managed to navigate the tricky waters between living a life you could be proud of and still delighting in the many things there are to take pleasure in.”

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

“Getting a tattoo would probably make me cry.”

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

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

“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.”

“There's always a source for humor.”

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

“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....”

“Daddy, how come in Kansas City the bagels taste like just round bread?”

“Health food makes me sick.”

“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.”