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.
GILES CORENAll I care about is that people who like me think I’m funny. I get on with writing pretty straight-down the line, old-fashioned stuff.
More Giles Coren Quotes
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He was a staffer at Punch but in the evening he wrote columns for the Evening Standard and The Times.
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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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The first thing I remember is that my dad had a big iron Olivetti typewriter and he worked all night.
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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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I think unionization of labour is a great thing.
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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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Gradually, I developed opinions about food, and my French friends taught me that you have to complain in a restaurant.
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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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I always feel quite Jewish but I used to deny it until I was in my twenties.
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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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My sister’s also very, very competitive but she is more concerned than I am with being liked. So she hides it away. I try to make my competitiveness part of my charm.
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Have you ever been to the countryside? It’s so small. And there’s nothing to do.
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I sleep nine hours every night, I have a little nap after lunch, and, if I’m going out for dinner, I sneak in an extra one before I head out.
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When I write I inhabit a personality that is and is not me.
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People like me make modern life intolerable.
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I have quite good general knowledge and I had a very drilled education from an early age. I do know more than most people.
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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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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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We’ve got rid of subeditors because we don’t need them. Because they were never necessary. They were just fetchers and gophers. They had a job, which has been superannuated by technology.
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I come from a country where there’s a reputation for bad press.
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It was fine for my Polish Ashkenazi forebears to live on dumplings and potatoes, because they laboured in the fields. But that diet is unsuitable for an urban lifestyle.
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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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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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I always say what I think to be amusing.
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So what on Earth there isn’t to like about New York? I don’t know. But what you do also have is a load of very ordinary restaurants which you make a terrible fuss about which are really only very average. Which is fine. One doesn’t go to New York for the food.
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I know more than most journalists. I know more than most columnists on big, important newspapers.
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