How clever am I? I’m really quite clever. I mean, look, I’ve got a first-class degree from Oxford.
GILES CORENThere 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.
More Giles Coren Quotes
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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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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.
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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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Have you ever been to the countryside? It’s so small. And there’s nothing to do.
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My dad is the best and funniest newspaper columnist. There is nobody anywhere near as good.
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I always say what I think to be amusing.
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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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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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He was a staffer at Punch but in the evening he wrote columns for the Evening Standard and The Times.
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The good fortune of my life, which has been to turn those glittering nights into my job, all came from there.
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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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The first thing I remember is that my dad had a big iron Olivetti typewriter and he worked all night.
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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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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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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