Calvin Trillin Quotes

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

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.

~ Calvin Trillin

School plays were invented partly to give parents and easy opportunity to demonstrate their priorities.

~ Calvin Trillin

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

~ Calvin Trillin

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.

~ Calvin Trillin

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....

~ Calvin Trillin

...the existential paradox we all experience; we feel that we are immortal, yet we know that we will die.

~ 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

If law school is so hard to get through how come there are so many lawyers?

~ 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

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

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

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

~ Calvin Trillin

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

~ Calvin Trillin

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

~ Calvin Trillin