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.
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 sleep nine hours every night, I have a little nap after lunch, and, if I’m going out for dinner, I sneak in an extra one before I head out.
GILES COREN -
In the beginning, we huddled in cities for our own protection.
GILES COREN -
Of course you can get a decent mouthful of food in New York. You can get a decent mouthful of food in Nairobi.
GILES COREN -
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 COREN -
My dad never really wrote what he thought. None of his inner rage and darkness and problems, which we all have, made it on to the page. For him, writing was a process of making everything appear funny.
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 -
I always say what I think to be amusing.
GILES COREN -
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.
GILES COREN -
The good fortune of my life, which has been to turn those glittering nights into my job, all came from there.
GILES COREN -
He was a staffer at Punch but in the evening he wrote columns for the Evening Standard and The Times.
GILES COREN -
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.
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 -
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 -
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 -
Have you ever been to the countryside? It’s so small. And there’s nothing to do.
GILES COREN






