162 Quotes by Calvin Trillin

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.

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

Reporters also tend to love trials. It may be that we are transfixed by a process in which the person being asked a question actually has to answer it. He cannot say he would rather not comment. He cannot tell an anecdote on a different subject. He has to answer the question—under oath that he is telling the truth.

Health food makes me sick.

Daddy, how come in Kansas City the bagels taste like just round bread?

Because a superior fried-chicken restaurant is often the institutional extension of a single chicken-obsessed woman, I realize that, like a good secondhand bookstore or a bad South American dictatorship, it is not easily passed down intact.

In the rather informal survey I have taken over the years on intensity of interest in food by profession, lawyers rank only a few trades below concert pianists....

If Lincoln freed the slaves and preserved the Union, how come'Lincolnesque' just means tall?

Someone who managed to navigate the tricky waters between living a life you could be proud of and still delighting in the many things there are to take pleasure in.