Giles Coren

“Gradually, I developed opinions about food, and my French friends taught me that you have to complain in a restaurant.”

“The notion of getting pleasure from food has gone too far; we can also get pleasure from anticipating a meal, and from not being quite sated.”

“My dad is the best and funniest newspaper columnist. There is nobody anywhere near as good.”

“I used to be so angry. I think back to my early days as a critic in the late 1990s, and I blush. I would go swaggering into restaurants in some ridiculous tramp disguise, challenging them to mistreat me, order the things I was least likely to enjoy, then hurl my plate aside in a fury and demand to see the manager.”

“My dad was very successful as a journalist, so I didn't want to be one. I wanted to be a novelist.”

“I let the other reviewers eat the bad meals, so that I didn't have to, and my wife and I went out only for the good stuff. And I wrote mostly positive reviews. Not only. But mostly. And, ooooh, it felt an awful lot better.”

“I'm not a mad, crazy foodie. But I have strong opinions and I know a lot about food.”

“We've got rid of subeditors because we don't need them. Because they were never necessary. They were just fetchers and gophers. They had a job, which has been superannuated by technology.”

“At home, we have fish and greens, fish and greens - maybe salmon steak with curried lentils. No poncy cooking goes on, we don't have dinner parties, we don't entertain.”

“Instant gratification is bringing this planet to its knees.”

“How clever am I? I'm really quite clever. I mean, look, I've got a first-class degree from Oxford.”

“As a broadly left-wing, environmentally aware urban believer in anthropogenic global warming, I am all for a total ban on motor vehicles.”

“My dad Alan loved Westerns and we watched them together when there wasn't much else on TV. I had toy cowboys I'd call Richard Widmark or Gregory Peck and we'd restage the Battle of the Alamo.”

“All I care about is that people who like me think I'm funny. I get on with writing pretty straight-down the line, old-fashioned stuff.”

“My time in Paris was an education in both the grimness of a relentless, grinding day job and the joys of nights in glittering restaurants. The good fortune of my life, which has been to turn those glittering nights into my job, all came from there.”

“The first thing I remember is that my dad had a big iron Olivetti typewriter and he worked all night. He was a staffer at Punch but in the evening he wrote columns for the Evening Standard and The Times.”

“My dad never really wrote what he thought. None of his inner rage and darkness and problems, which we all have, made it on to the page. For him, writing was a process of making everything appear funny.”

“When I write I inhabit a personality that is and is not me.”

“But still I can never shake the feeling that buses are somehow beneath me. Which is why I have a rule regarding their use: I never, ever run for one. And nor should you.”

“I tried to leave the city once, for one of those other places. And, my God, the silence. I could hear myself think, and found that I wasn't. I am not designed to be lonely as a cloud.”