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.
GILES CORENMy dad was very successful as a journalist, so I didn’t want to be one. I wanted to be a novelist.
More Giles Coren Quotes
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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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My dad is the best and funniest newspaper columnist. There is nobody anywhere near as good.
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When I write I inhabit a personality that is and is not me.
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The notion of getting pleasure from food has gone too far; we can also get pleasure from anticipating a meal, and from not being quite sated.
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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.
GILES COREN -
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 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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I always feel quite Jewish but I used to deny it until I was in my twenties.
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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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Instant gratification is bringing this planet to its knees.
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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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The way I write possibly shouldn’t be turned on serious things.
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In the beginning, we huddled in cities for our own protection.
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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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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.
GILES COREN