The way I write possibly shouldn’t be turned on serious things.
GILES CORENHow clever am I? I’m really quite clever. I mean, look, I’ve got a first-class degree from Oxford.
More Giles Coren Quotes
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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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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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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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He was a staffer at Punch but in the evening he wrote columns for the Evening Standard and The Times.
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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 have Gordon Ramsay to thank for my TV career because Channel 4 spent a long time trying to find him a sidekick for ‘The F Word’, then he suggested me, knowing I’d stand up to him.
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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 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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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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In the beginning, we huddled in cities for our own protection.
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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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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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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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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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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 know more than most journalists. I know more than most columnists on big, important newspapers.
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All 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.
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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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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 was 41 when I became a dad. I try to be as much fun as my father was, but I’m at home more – and less of a disciplinarian.
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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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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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My dad Alan loved Westerns and we watched them together when there wasn’t much else on TV. I had toy cowboys I’d call Richard Widmark or Gregory Peck and we’d restage the Battle of the Alamo.
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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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