Quotes from Calvin Trillin

Being on a book tour is a lot easier than reporting.

When you're writing, you are robbed of your delivery.

I've written three books you could think of as memoirs.

I do remember in high school I wanted to be a disc jockey.

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.

Every good idea sooner or later degenerates into hard work.

Health food makes me sick.

The price of purity is purists.

When someone reaches middle age, people he knows begin to get put in charge of things, and knowing what he knows about the people who are being put in charge of things scares the hell out of him.

Why in the world are you a Republican?

By the way, did you fellows know that a hummingbird weighs as much as a quarter? Do you think a hummingbird also weighs the same as two dimes and a nickel? But then she asked a question of her own: How do they weigh a hummingbird?

I never did very well in math-I could never seem to persuade the teacher that I hadn't meant my answers literally.

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

She believed in the principle of enoughness. from About Alice

your children are either the center of your life or they're not, and the rest is commentary

understand what Ernest Becker meant when he said something like 'To live fully is to live with an awareness of the rumble of terror that underlies everything

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

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

All White House hopefuls we forewarn: You'll have to prove that you were born. Before Trump hits the state of granite, He must identify the planet Where he first took on human form - A place where blowhards are the norm.

If Lincoln freed the slaves and preserved the Union, how come 'Lincolnesque' just means tall?

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

I am firmly committed to the proposition that whoever is in power is exceedingly silly.... And that goes for the opposition as well.

Paull has his own style, which is folksy, not canned. Religion? He's got one. His prophet's Ayn Rand. By Rand's eerie theories he's fervently gripped, So he won't do flip-flops. He long ago flipped.

For Alice, of course, the measure of how you held up in the face of a life-threatening illness was not how much you changed but how much you stayed the same, in control of your own identity.