I had become mean and stupid and deliberately hurtful because that is what is expected of restaurant critics. Of critics in general.
GILES CORENI have quite good general knowledge and I had a very drilled education from an early age. I do know more than most people.
More Giles Coren Quotes
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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 good fortune of my life, which has been to turn those glittering nights into my job, all came from there.
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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.
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As a broadly left-wing, environmentally aware urban believer in anthropogenic global warming, I am all for a total ban on motor vehicles.
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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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When I was 16 my dad taught me to drive too. Furiously. Unable to understand why I couldn’t already do it – for driving, to him, was innate in the human. It was what separated us from the apes. And from the French, who weren’t much good at it either.
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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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In the beginning, we huddled in cities for our own protection.
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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.
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How clever am I? I’m really quite clever. I mean, look, I’ve got a first-class degree from Oxford.
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I come from a country where there’s a reputation for bad press.
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I used to be a very angry person, I used to throw things and break them. Then I had five years of constant psycho-analysis, and I don’t get angry any more.
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Of course you can get a decent mouthful of food in New York. You can get a decent mouthful of food in Nairobi.
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I’m not a mad, crazy foodie. But I have strong opinions and I know a lot about food.
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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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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 say what I think to be amusing.
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The way I write possibly shouldn’t be turned on serious things.
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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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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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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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I used to be so angry. I think back to my early days as a critic in the late 1990s, and I blush.
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Instant gratification is bringing this planet to its knees.
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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.
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Being a success in the world, having total control of one’s life, is about being able to take or leave things.
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