The first thing I remember is that my dad had a big iron Olivetti typewriter and he worked all night.
GILES CORENMy time in Paris was an education in both the grimness of a relentless, grinding day job and the joys of nights in glittering restaurants.
More Giles Coren Quotes
-
-
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 -
I’m not a mad, crazy foodie. But I have strong opinions and I know a lot about food.
GILES COREN -
He was a staffer at Punch but in the evening he wrote columns for the Evening Standard and The Times.
GILES COREN -
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.
GILES COREN -
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.
GILES COREN -
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 COREN -
Not 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.
GILES COREN -
People think you get paid millions by the BBC if you’re famous, but me? Me, I’m in the Premier Inn in Gillingham.
GILES COREN -
Have you ever been to the countryside? It’s so small. And there’s nothing to do.
GILES COREN -
The way I write possibly shouldn’t be turned on serious things.
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 -
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.
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 -
I had become mean and stupid and deliberately hurtful because that is what is expected of restaurant critics. Of critics in general.
GILES COREN -
Instant gratification is bringing this planet to its knees.
GILES COREN