My dad was very successful as a journalist, so I didn’t want to be one. I wanted to be a novelist.
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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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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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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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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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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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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Gradually, I developed opinions about food, and my French friends taught me that you have to complain in a restaurant.
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But still I can never shake the feeling that buses are somehow beneath me. Which is why I have a rule regarding their use: I never, ever run for one. And nor should you.
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I think unionization of labour is a great thing.
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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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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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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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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.
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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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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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I used to be so angry. I think back to my early days as a critic in the late 1990s, and I blush.
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