Quotes from Calvin Trillin

Even today, well-brought-up English girls are taught by their mothers to boil all veggies for at least a month and a half, just in case one of the dinner guests turns up without his teeth.

People, not just reporters, are more interested in politics than in government, so the actual issues wouldn't be something that interested them.

If bumblebee leavings and stump paste are so good for you, why can't any of those guys (in the health stores) grow full beards?

Sometimes, if I had until the next day to turn the story in, I'd head home, finding that the knot in the narrative came loose with the rhythmic clacking of the subway train.

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.

With humor, it's so subjective that trying to think of what the ideal reader would think would drive you crazy.

I've always thought that parallel parking was my main talent.

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.

Getting a tattoo would probably make me cry.

The shelf life of the average trade book is somewhere between milk and yogurt.

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

The way I read Billy Carter's testimony, he was a model citizen himself until the voters went and ruined his life by making his brother President.

The question about those aromatic advertisements that perfume companies are having stitched into magazines these days is this: under the freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment, is smelling up the place a constitutionally protected form of expression?

Math was always my bad subject. I couldn't convince my teachers that many of my answers were meant ironically.

The average trade book has a shelf life of between milk and yogurt, except for books by any member of the Irving Wallace family - they have preservatives.

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.

Perhaps we've time to have a look at the Number Thirty-One bus queue before we turn in.

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

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

When it comes to rapacious 19th century capitalism, my family's hands are clean.

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

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

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.'

We all know funny people who can't get it down on the page - even funny writers who can't get it down on the page.