Not since Ancient Greece have cities been thought of as the ideal living environment for humans. And that was so long ago it predates the invention of trousers.
GILES CORENI 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.
More Giles Coren Quotes
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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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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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My dad is the best and funniest newspaper columnist. There is nobody anywhere near as good.
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As drivers desert the city I find myself clinging more and more to my father’s belief that a man without a car is not really a man.
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I know more than most journalists. I know more than most columnists on big, important newspapers.
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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.
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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 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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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.
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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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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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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 used to be a very angry person, I used to throw things and break them. Then I had five years of constant psycho-analysis, and I don’t get angry any more.
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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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