I come from a country where there’s a reputation for bad press.
GILES CORENWhen 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.
More Giles Coren Quotes
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I think unionization of labour is a great thing.
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I used to be so angry. I think back to my early days as a critic in the late 1990s, and I blush.
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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.
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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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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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When I write I inhabit a personality that is and is not me.
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I’m not a mad, crazy foodie. But I have strong opinions and I know a lot about food.
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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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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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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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