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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.

Giles Coren

We built walls around them with slits through which to fire arrows at scary, cross-eyed rural people, and brought our food and family inside because they were the safest places to be.
GILES COREN

Arrow Brought Build Cross Family Food Inside People Place Rural Safety Scary Wall
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.
GILES COREN

Anticipate Being Far Food Gone Meal Motion Pleasure Quite
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.
GILES COREN

Curried Fish Green Home Lentis Salmon Steak
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.
GILES COREN

Country Drive Either Furious Good Innate Separate Taught Unable Understand
People like me make modern life intolerable.
GILES COREN

Intolerable Life Mark Modern People
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 COREN

City Cloud Design Ear God Leve Lonely Myself Place Try
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.
GILES COREN

Cloth Excite Imagine Movie People Shop Sometime Work Year
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.
GILES COREN

Average Country Earth Fus Know Load Make Restuarant
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.
GILES COREN

Challenge Demand Disguise Hurt Likely Manager Mistreat Order Plate Restaurant Ridiculous Swagger Think Tramp
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.
GILES COREN

Delicious Fatty Feel Muscular Real Smell Smoke Stuff Understand
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.
GILES COREN

Being Charm Competitive Competitiveness Concern More Most Try World
My dad is the best and funniest newspaper columnist. There is nobody anywhere near as good.
GILES COREN

Anywhere Best Columnist Dad Funny Good Newspaper Nobody
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 COREN

All Appear Dad Darkness Everything Funny Inner Made Make Page Problem Rage Really Though Wrote
I always say what I think to be amusing.
GILES COREN

Always Anything Say Thing
How clever am I? I’m really quite clever. I mean, look, I’ve got a first-class degree from Oxford.
GILES COREN

Class Clever Country Degree First Look Mean
I come from a country where there’s a reputation for bad press.
GILES COREN

Bad Come Country Press Reputation

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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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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Popular Authors

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