Top 80 Calvin Trillin Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The Banh Mi sandwich is really the only good argument for colonialism.”

— Calvin Trillin

2. “In modern America, anyone who attempts to write satirically about the events of the day finds it difficult to concoct a situation so bizarre that it may not actually come to pass while his article is still on the presses.”

— Calvin Trillin

3. “It has long been acknowledged that the single best restaurant in the world is Arthur Bryant’s Barbecue at Eighteenth and Booklyn in Kansas city.”

— Calvin Trillin

4. “Marriage is not merely sharing the fettucini, but sharing the burden of finding the fettucini restaurant in the first place.”

— Calvin Trillin

5. “The price of purity is purists.”

— Calvin Trillin

6. “Following the Romanian tradition, garlic is used in excess to keep the vampires away.”

— Calvin Trillin

7. “The most remarkable thing about my mother is that for thirty years she served the family nothing but leftovers. The original meal has never been found.”

— Calvin Trillin

8. “When you’re writing, you are robbed of your delivery.”

— Calvin Trillin

9. “Why in the world are you a Republican?”

— Calvin Trillin

10. “Even today, well-brought-up English girls are taught by their mothers to boil all veggies for at least a month and a half, just in case one of the dinner guests turns up without his teeth.”

— Calvin Trillin

11. “Anybody who doesn’t think that the best hamburger place in teh world is in his home town is a sissy.”

— Calvin Trillin

12. “Math was always my bad subject. I couldn’t convince my teachers that many of my answers were meant ironically.”

— Calvin Trillin

13. “The shelf life of the average trade book is somewhere between milk and yogurt.”

— Calvin Trillin

14. “I’ve always thought that parallel parking was my main talent.”

— Calvin Trillin

15. “The margin of error in astrology is plus or minus one hundred percent.”

— Calvin Trillin

16. “As far as I’m concerned, ‘whom’ is a word that was invented to make everyone sound like a butler.”

— Calvin Trillin

17. “I like chili, but not enough to discuss it with someone from Texas.”

— Calvin Trillin

18. “Do my ears deceive me, or can I actually hear the sounds of worms turning? You say a turning worm makes no sound? But how about a chorus of turning worms?”

— Calvin Trillin

19. “Health food makes me sick.”

— Calvin Trillin

20. “When it comes to rapacious 19th century capitalism, my family’s hands are clean.”

— Calvin Trillin

21. “I never eat in a restaurant that’s over a hundred feet off the ground and won’t stand still.”

— Calvin Trillin

22. “Every good idea sooner or later degenerates into hard work.”

— Calvin Trillin

23. “Money not spent on a luxury one considered even briefly is the equivalent of windfall income and should be spent accordingly.”

— Calvin Trillin

24. “When someone reaches middle age, people he knows begin to get put in charge of things, and knowing what he knows about the people who are being put in charge of things scares the hell out of him.”

— Calvin Trillin

25. “Anybody caught selling macrame in public should be dyed a natural color and hung out to dry.”

— Calvin Trillin

26. “I suppose that there are endeavors in which self-confidence is even more important than it is in writing – tightrope walking comes immediately to mind – but it’s difficult for me to think of anybody producing much writing if his confidence is completely shot.”

— Calvin Trillin

27. “The food in such places is so tasteless because the members associate spices and garlic with just the sort of people they’re trying to keep out.”

— Calvin Trillin

28. “I’m more disturbed when people expect me to be serious.”

— Calvin Trillin

29. “The average trade book has a shelf life of between milk and yogurt, except for books by any member of the Irving Wallace family – they have preservatives.”

— Calvin Trillin

30. “How did Italy manage to end up with no Caribbean islands at all? Christopher Columbus took the trouble to discover the Caribbean personally before the end of the fifteenth century. Try to get a decent plate of spaghetti there now.”

— Calvin Trillin

31. “Daddy, how come in Kansas City the bagels taste like just round bread?”

— Calvin Trillin

32. “If it’s inappropriate to write about, if there’s nothing funny about it, then it’s not funny.”

— Calvin Trillin

33. “I don’t care where I sit, as long as I get fed.”

— Calvin Trillin

34. “If Lincoln freed the slaves and preserved the Union, how come ‘Lincolnesque’ just means tall?”

— Calvin Trillin

35. “At American weddings, the quality of the food is in inverse proportion to the social position of the bride and groom.”

— Calvin Trillin

36. “Keeping off a large weight loss is a phenomenon about as common in American medicine as an impoverished dermatologist.”

— Calvin Trillin

37. “There is no question that Rumanian-Jewish food is heavy. One meal is equal in heaviness, I would guess, to eight or nine years of steady mung-bean eating.”

— Calvin Trillin

38. “Taking pleasure in the dark side may be some sort of occupational hazard for reporters.”

— Calvin Trillin

39. “With humor, it’s so subjective that trying to think of what the ideal reader would think would drive you crazy.”

— Calvin Trillin

40. “It happens to be a matter of record that I was first in print with the discovery that the tastelessness of the food offered in American clubs varies in direct proportion to the exclusiveness of the club.”

— Calvin Trillin

41. “Did you know that five out of three people have trouble with fractions.”

— Calvin Trillin

42. “By the way, did you fellows know that a hummingbird weighs as much as a quarter? Do you think a hummingbird also weighs the same as two dimes and a nickel? But then she asked a question of her own: How do they weigh a hummingbird?”

— Calvin Trillin

43. “We all know funny people who can’t get it down on the page – even funny writers who can’t get it down on the page.”

— Calvin Trillin

44. “People, not just reporters, are more interested in politics than in government, so the actual issues wouldn’t be something that interested them.”

— Calvin Trillin

45. “When it comes to Chinese food I have always operated under the policy that the less known about the preparation the better. A wise diner who is invited to visit the kitchen replies by saying, as politely as possible, that he has a pressing engagement elsewhere.”

— Calvin Trillin

46. “When helicopters were snatching people from the grounds of the American embassy compound during the panic of the final Vietcong push into Saigon, I was sitting in front of the television set shouting, Get the chefs! Get the chefs!”

— Calvin Trillin

47. “There is a theory that sooner or later anything in America that is any fun at all will be ruined by people from California.”

— Calvin Trillin

48. “Everybody is who he was in high school.”

— Calvin Trillin

49. “Irving Wallace family – they have preservatives.”

— Calvin Trillin

50. “School plays were invented partly to give parents and easy opportunity to demonstrate their priorities.”

— Calvin Trillin