I used to be so angry. I think back to my early days as a critic in the late 1990s, and I blush.
GILES CORENIt 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.
More Giles Coren Quotes
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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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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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Of course you can get a decent mouthful of food in New York. You can get a decent mouthful of food in Nairobi.
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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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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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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 know more than most journalists. I know more than most columnists on big, important newspapers.
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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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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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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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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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Have you ever been to the countryside? It’s so small. And there’s nothing to do.
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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.
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The way I write possibly shouldn’t be turned on serious things.
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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.
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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.
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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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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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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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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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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 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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The first thing I remember is that my dad had a big iron Olivetti typewriter and he worked all night.
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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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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.
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