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I actually think of being funny as an odd turn of mind, like a mild disability, some weird way of looking at the world that you can't get rid of.

Calvin Trillin

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Calvin Trillin
Age: 89
Born: 1935
Born: December 5
Journalist
Novelist
Poet
Kansas City
Missouri
Calvin Marshall Trillin
Actually
Funny
Mild
Mind
Disability
Way
Odd
Think
Weird
Thinking
Turn
Like
Looking
World
Turns

More quotes by Calvin Trillin

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I'm in favor of liberalizing immigration because of the effect it would have on restaurants. I'd let just about everybody in except the English.
Calvin Trillin
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When you're writing, you are robbed of your delivery.
Calvin Trillin
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I do remember in high school I wanted to be a disc jockey.
Calvin Trillin
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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
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What interests me is what you might call vernacular writing, writing that connects you to a place.
Calvin Trillin
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What campaigns are for is weeding out the people who, for one way or another, weren't making it for the long haul.
Calvin Trillin
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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
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If it's inappropriate to write about, if there's nothing funny about it, then it's not funny.
Calvin Trillin
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Being on a book tour is a lot easier than reporting.
Calvin Trillin
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Everything was blamed on Castro. Mudslides in California. The fact that you can't buy a decent tomato anymore. Was there an exceptionally high pollen count in Massapequa, Long Island, one day? It was Castro, exporting sneezes.
Calvin Trillin
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A new regulation for the publishing industry: The advance for a book must be larger than the check for the lunch at which it was discussed.
Calvin Trillin
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One advantage of a monarchy is that a monarchy does not suffer the effects of having great clots of white Christians moping around simply because they aren't the king or queen.
Calvin Trillin
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There's always a source for humor [in politics]. If it's inappropriate to write about, if there's nothing funny about it, then it's not funny. So it sort of selects itself. It has to. And plus, often something that wouldn't be funny at the time is okay to make jokes about later.
Calvin Trillin
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If bumblebee leavings and stump paste are so good for you, why can't any of those guys (in the health stores) grow full beards?
Calvin Trillin
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As part of my research for An Anthology of Authors' Atrocity Stories About Publishers, I conducted a study (employing my usual controls) that showed the average shelf life of a trade book to be somewhere between milk and yoghurt.
Calvin Trillin
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I've written three books you could think of as memoirs.
Calvin Trillin
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Keeping off a large weight loss is a phenomenon about as common in American medicine as an impoverished dermatologist.
Calvin Trillin
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Since nostaglia is fueled by inflation, could it be that inflation is the result of a conspiracy by the people who are trying to palm off McGovern buttons and Howdy Doody puppets and their Aunt Thelma's toaster as antiques.
Calvin Trillin
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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
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Before I was born [my father] wanted me to go specifically to Yale, which he thought would help. It was easy for him to think I could be president: he didn't have to worry about being president himself, being ineligible because he wasn't born in the United States.
Calvin Trillin