Giles Coren

“Of course you can get a decent mouthful of food in New York. You can get a decent mouthful of food in Nairobi. You can get a decent mouthful of food in Warsaw or Chad if you look hard enough. It's just I wouldn't actually go there looking for the food.”

“I have quite good general knowledge and I had a very drilled education from an early age. I do know more than most people. I know more than most journalists. I know more than most columnists on big, important newspapers.”

“People think you get paid millions by the BBC if you're famous, but me? Me, I'm in the Premier Inn in Gillingham.”

“I always feel quite Jewish but I used to deny it until I was in my twenties.”

“People like me make modern life intolerable.”

“Not since Ancient Greece have cities been thought of as the ideal living environment for humans. And that was so long ago it predates the invention of trousers.”

“Where my dad taught me everything about writing, Graham Paterson, who gave me my first job at The Times, taught me everything about journalism, which is that it's no big deal, and it's more important to have a glass of wine.”

“When I tell people I spent almost a year in Paris, I know they imagine something out of a Woody Allen movie, which it wasn't, of course. I was just working in a clothes shop, but I was aware that it was exciting.”

“It was fine for my Polish Ashkenazi forebears to live on dumplings and potatoes, because they laboured in the fields. But that diet is unsuitable for an urban lifestyle.”

“Gentile smoked salmon is all... muscular and smells of smoke. It's not very fatty. They don't understand - smoked salmon should be almost spreadable! So you give them the real stuff and they can't believe how delicious it is.”

“There is nothing wrong with getting a bus. Nothing in any way demeaning about boarding a huge smelly communal vehicle that will rumble noisily and very slowly in the vague direction of the place you need to get to and then dump you half a mile away in the freezing wind and rain.”

“So what on Earth there isn't to like about New York? I don't know. But what you do also have is a load of very ordinary restaurants which you make a terrible fuss about which are really only very average. Which is fine. One doesn't go to New York for the food.”

“A man of strong opinions is one thing. But a man whose strong opinions depend entirely on how he is feeling in that instant is a disastrous thing in a city of 10 million people just trying to muddle through.”

“I think unionization of labour is a great thing.”

“Hipsters being hipsters, coolness and inaccessibility have overtaken all other concerns. Food no longer matters. Even burgers are too foody. All a restaurant needs to be now is a place with bricks and exposed plumbing where you can take an edgy selfie that will make your friends feel like they are missing out.”