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 CORENWhen I write I inhabit a personality that is and is not me.
More Giles Coren Quotes
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My dad is the best and funniest newspaper columnist. There is nobody anywhere near as good.
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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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Instant gratification is bringing this planet to its knees.
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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’m not a mad, crazy foodie. But I have strong opinions and I know a lot about food.
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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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People like me make modern life intolerable.
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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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He was a staffer at Punch but in the evening he wrote columns for the Evening Standard and The Times.
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My dad was very successful as a journalist, so I didn’t want to be one. I wanted to be a novelist.
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World cross-fertilization is fantastic. Immigration across the world has led to all kinds of fantastic new and exciting kinds of food being available. And there’s all kinds of different kinds of restaurants.
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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.
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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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I come from a country where there’s a reputation for bad press.
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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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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 a tailor now, I have a doctor, a wine merchant, a jeweller, a gardener, a cleaner, and a nanny. It was clearly ridiculous that I did not have a hairdresser. So I got one.
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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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We’ve got rid of subeditors because we don’t need them. Because they were never necessary. They were just fetchers and gophers. They had a job, which has been superannuated by technology.
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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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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.
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I had become mean and stupid and deliberately hurtful because that is what is expected of restaurant critics. Of critics in general.
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I sleep nine hours every night, I have a little nap after lunch, and, if I’m going out for dinner, I sneak in an extra one before I head out.
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When I write I inhabit a personality that is and is not me.
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I think unionization of labour is a great thing.
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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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