You can get a decent mouthful of food in Warsaw or Chad if you look hard enough. It’s just I wouldn’t actually go there looking for the food.
GILES CORENThe world’s most competitive man, my dad. Wouldn’t let us win at Monopoly… he wouldn’t cut any slack for his children.
More Giles Coren Quotes
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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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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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People think you get paid millions by the BBC if you’re famous, but me? Me, I’m in the Premier Inn in Gillingham.
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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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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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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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I think unionization of labour is a great thing.
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Instant gratification is bringing this planet to its knees.
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I know more than most journalists. I know more than most columnists on big, important newspapers.
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World cross-fertilization is fantastic. Immigration across the world has led to all kinds of fantastic new and exciting kinds of food being available. And there’s all kinds of different kinds of restaurants.
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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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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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I’m not a mad, crazy foodie. But I have strong opinions and I know a lot about food.
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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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I come from a country where there’s a reputation for bad press.
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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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People like me make modern life intolerable.
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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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When I write I inhabit a personality that is and is not me.
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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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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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My dad is the best and funniest newspaper columnist. There is nobody anywhere near as good.
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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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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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