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When I write I inhabit a personality that is and is not me.

Giles Coren

The world’s most competitive man, my dad. Wouldn’t let us win at Monopoly… he wouldn’t cut any slack for his children.
GILES COREN

Children Competetive Cut Dad Monopoly Stack World
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.
GILES COREN

Analysis Angry Break Constant Five Person Physio Thing Use 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 had become mean and stupid and deliberately hurtful because that is what is expected of restaurant critics. Of critics in general.
GILES COREN

Critic Deliberate Expect General Hurtful Mean Restaurant Stupid
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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Age Drill Early Education General Knowledge Most People Quite
Being a success in the world, having total control of one’s life, is about being able to take or leave things.
GILES COREN

Being Control Have Leave Life One Success Take Thing Word
In the beginning, we huddled in cities for our own protection.
GILES COREN

Beginning City Huddle Own Protection
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.
GILES COREN

Bus Getting Nothing With Wrong
Where my dad taught me everything about writing, Graham Paterson, who gave me my first job at The Times, taught me everything about journalism, which is that it’s no big deal, and it’s more important to have a glass of wine.
GILES COREN

Dad Everything First Job Laugh Person Taught Time
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
Gradually, I developed opinions about food, and my French friends taught me that you have to complain in a restaurant.
GILES COREN

Complain Country Develop Food Friend Gradually Restaurant Taught
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.
GILES COREN

Bottle Freight Glass heavy Mineral Occupy Ocean Patch Plastic Preposterous Stupidity Water
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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Class Clever Country Degree First Look Mean
I always feel quite Jewish but I used to deny it until I was in my twenties.
GILES COREN

Always Quite Deny Jewish Twenties Use
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
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

When I write I inhabit a personality that is and is not me.

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When I write I inhabit a personality that is and is not me.

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