Quotes from Giles Coren

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.

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

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.

In the beginning, we huddled in cities for our own protection. We built walls around them with slits through which to fire arrows at scary, cross-eyed rural people, and brought our food and family inside because they were the safest places to be.

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

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.

Have you ever been to the countryside? It's so small. And there's nothing to do.

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

As drivers desert the city I find myself clinging more and more to my father's belief that a man without a car is not really a man.

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

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.

I'm just a bit frustrated that in London we make such an effort to ape the New York restaurant scene. I have good friends who ape the New York restaurant scene and do it brilliantly. None of them would claim that the primary reason for going to their restaurant was the food.

I was 41 when I became a dad. I try to be as much fun as my father was, but I'm at home more - and less of a disciplinarian.

It doesn't matter how much of a hurry you think you are in. Be one of the people for whom ten minutes does not make a difference.

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.

I have a tailor now, I have a doctor, a wine merchant, a jeweller, a gardener, a cleaner, and a nanny. It was clearly ridiculous that I did not have a hairdresser. So I got one.

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.

Mineral water is a preposterous vanity, either bottled in glass which is stupidly heavy to freight, or in plastic that ends up in one of the plastic patches the size of Texas occupying our oceans.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I have Gordon Ramsay to thank for my TV career because Channel 4 spent a long time trying to find him a sidekick for 'The F Word', then he suggested me, knowing I'd stand up to him.

Personally I ride a bicycle, travel by train and bus and campaign tirelessly for a car taxation system that will hammer ignorant, selfish, petty, fat, spoilt, stupid car abusers into giving up their addiction and walking.