In the beginning, we huddled in cities for our own protection.
GILES CORENHave you ever been to the countryside? It’s so small. And there’s nothing to do.
More Giles Coren Quotes
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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.
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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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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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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 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 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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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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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.
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At home, we have fish and greens, fish and greens – maybe salmon steak with curried lentils. No poncy cooking goes on, we don’t have dinner parties, we don’t entertain.
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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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I always say what I think to be amusing.
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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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As drivers desert the city I find myself clinging more and more to my father’s belief that a man without a car is not really a man.
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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.
GILES COREN