My time in Paris was an education in both the grimness of a relentless, grinding day job and the joys of nights in glittering restaurants.
GILES CORENMy 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.
More Giles Coren Quotes
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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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You can get a decent mouthful of food in Warsaw or Chad if you look hard enough. It’s just I wouldn’t actually go there looking for the food.
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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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He was a staffer at Punch but in the evening he wrote columns for the Evening Standard and The Times.
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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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I let the other reviewers eat the bad meals, so that I didn’t have to, and my wife and I went out only for the good stuff. And I wrote mostly positive reviews. Not only. But mostly. And, ooooh, it felt an awful lot better.
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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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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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My dad is the best and funniest newspaper columnist. There is nobody anywhere near as good.
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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’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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Gradually, I developed opinions about food, and my French friends taught me that you have to complain in a restaurant.
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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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I think unionization of labour is a great thing.
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