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 CORENAs a broadly left-wing, environmentally aware urban believer in anthropogenic global warming, I am all for a total ban on motor vehicles.
More Giles Coren Quotes
-
-
The first thing I remember is that my dad had a big iron Olivetti typewriter and he worked all night.
GILES COREN -
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.
GILES COREN -
All I care about is that people who like me think I’m funny. I get on with writing pretty straight-down the line, old-fashioned stuff.
GILES COREN -
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.
GILES COREN -
I know more than most journalists. I know more than most columnists on big, important newspapers.
GILES COREN -
I have quite good general knowledge and I had a very drilled education from an early age. I do know more than most people.
GILES COREN -
The way I write possibly shouldn’t be turned on serious things.
GILES COREN -
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.
GILES COREN -
It doesn’t matter how much of a hurry you think you are in. Be one of the people for whom ten minutes does not make a difference.
GILES COREN -
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 COREN -
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 -
I think unionization of labour is a great thing.
GILES COREN -
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.
GILES COREN -
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.
GILES COREN -
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.
GILES COREN -
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 -
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 -
I’m not a mad, crazy foodie. But I have strong opinions and I know a lot about food.
GILES COREN -
My dad is the best and funniest newspaper columnist. There is nobody anywhere near as good.
GILES COREN -
As a broadly left-wing, environmentally aware urban believer in anthropogenic global warming, I am all for a total ban on motor vehicles.
GILES COREN -
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 -
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.
GILES COREN -
In the beginning, we huddled in cities for our own protection.
GILES COREN -
Personally I ride a bicycle, travel by train and bus and campaign tirelessly for a car taxation system that will hammer ignorant, selfish, petty, fat, spoilt, stupid car abusers into giving up their addiction and walking.
GILES COREN -
When I write I inhabit a personality that is and is not me.
GILES COREN -
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.
GILES COREN