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.
GILES CORENNot 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.
More Giles Coren Quotes
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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 have Gordon Ramsay to thank for my TV career because Channel 4 spent a long time trying to find him a sidekick for ‘The F Word’, then he suggested me, knowing I’d stand up to him.
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I’m just a bit frustrated that in London we make such an effort to ape the New York restaurant scene. I have good friends who ape the New York restaurant scene and do it brilliantly. None of them would claim that the primary reason for going to their restaurant was the food.
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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.
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I know more than most journalists. I know more than most columnists on big, important newspapers.
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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 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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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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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.
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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.
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In the beginning, we huddled in cities for our own protection.
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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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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.
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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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But still I can never shake the feeling that buses are somehow beneath me. Which is why I have a rule regarding their use: I never, ever run for one. And nor should you.
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