Quotes from Calvin Trillin

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.

She wanted to protect us from worry, from sadness, from loneliness--things her parents had not been able to protect her from. (About Alice)

In the early sixties, the notion that racism was not acceptable even in certain regions or certain clubs or certain circumstances—the notion that it could not be treated with moderation—was a notion largely confined to black people.

No sophisticated study of public opinion is needed to establish the fact that in the United States, North or South, a white life is considered to be of more value than a Negro life.

Our oldest grandchild has precisely Alice's coloring, which may be one reason I sometimes have trouble taking my eyes off her.

JACKSON HAS NEVER stood apart from the rest of Mississippi the way Atlanta has stood apart from Georgia, say, or New Orleans from Louisiana.

Do you think the people you preach to have a feeling of love?" the young man asked. "Well, I'm not talking about weak love," King explained. "I'm talking about love with justice. Weak love can be sentimental and empty. I'm talking about the love that is strong, so that you love your fellow men enough to lead them to justice.

According to Harold Fleming, for instance, who was then director of the Southern Regional Council, a small Atlanta hotbed of what he now calls "premature integrationists," a moderate was "a white man without sidearms.

IT WAS CUSTOMARY in the South for outside observers to interpret events in terms of ideology (usually racial ideology) and for local observers to interpret the same events in terms of money (usually graft).

The naked statement—a black man has been killed by a white policeman—is such a fearsome divider of the races that the people who preside over a city immediately try to cover it with details.

Long Island is the single most segregated suburban area in the United States.

Once, in Lisbon, I tried my best to work the phone book in a way that would assuage a longing [Alice and I] had for certain Chinese dishes . . . .

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.

My problem with math was that I was never able to convince my teachers that many of my answers were meant ironically.

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....

The American people are sick to death of people taking advantage of laws and then playing victim. This man is not a victim. He's a provocateur. Simple as that.

La comida sana me enferma

There's always a source for humor.

Marriage is not merely sharing the fettucini, but sharing the burden of finding the fettucini restaurant in the first place.

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

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.

If General Haig is so smart, why did he finish 214th (out of 310) in his graduating class at West Point? Does that mean there are 213 generals his age who are smarter than he is?

The ceiling on taxation of capital gains reflects the national belief that speculation is a more worthwhile way to make a living than work.