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.
GILES CORENBeing a success in the world, having total control of one’s life, is about being able to take or leave things.
More Giles Coren Quotes
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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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I come from a country where there’s a reputation for bad press.
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In the beginning, we huddled in cities for our own protection.
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I had become mean and stupid and deliberately hurtful because that is what is expected of restaurant critics. Of critics in general.
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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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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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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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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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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 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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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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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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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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