My dad is the best and funniest newspaper columnist. There is nobody anywhere near as good.
GILES CORENAs 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.
More Giles Coren Quotes
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Instant gratification is bringing this planet to its knees.
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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.
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Gentile smoked salmon is all… muscular and smells of smoke. It’s not very fatty. They don’t understand – smoked salmon should be almost spreadable! So you give them the real stuff and they can’t believe how delicious it is.
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My time in Paris was an education in both the grimness of a relentless, grinding day job and the joys of nights in glittering restaurants.
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I always feel quite Jewish but I used to deny it until I was in my twenties.
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A man of strong opinions is one thing. But a man whose strong opinions depend entirely on how he is feeling in that instant is a disastrous thing in a city of 10 million people just trying to muddle through.
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I would go swaggering into restaurants in some ridiculous tramp disguise, challenging them to mistreat me, order the things I was least likely to enjoy, then hurl my plate aside in a fury and demand to see the manager.
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Gradually, I developed opinions about food, and my French friends taught me that you have to complain in a restaurant.
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At home, we have fish and greens, fish and greens – maybe salmon steak with curried lentils. No poncy cooking goes on, we don’t have dinner parties, we don’t entertain.
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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.
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My dad was very successful as a journalist, so I didn’t want to be one. I wanted to be a novelist.
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I tried to leave the city once, for one of those other places. And, my God, the silence. I could hear myself think, and found that I wasn’t. I am not designed to be lonely as a cloud.
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The world’s most competitive man, my dad. Wouldn’t let us win at Monopoly… he wouldn’t cut any slack for his children.
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The good fortune of my life, which has been to turn those glittering nights into my job, all came from there.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Not since Ancient Greece have cities been thought of as the ideal living environment for humans. And that was so long ago it predates the invention of trousers.
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People like me make modern life intolerable.
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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.
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The first thing I remember is that my dad had a big iron Olivetti typewriter and he worked all night.
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The way I write possibly shouldn’t be turned on serious things.
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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.
GILES COREN