Quote

What interests me is what you might call vernacular writing, writing that connects you to a place.

Calvin Trillin

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Calvin Trillin
Age: 88
Born: 1935
Born: December 5
Journalist
Novelist
Poet
Kansas City
Missouri
Calvin Marshall Trillin
Vernacular
Connects
Interests
Call
Interest
Place
Might
Writing

More quotes by Calvin Trillin

Image
I've written three books you could think of as memoirs.
Calvin Trillin
Image
At American weddings, the quality of the food is in inverse proportion to the social position of the bride and groom.
Calvin Trillin
Image
I like chili, but not enough to discuss it with someone from Texas.
Calvin Trillin
Image
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
Image
Money not spent on a luxury one considered even briefly is the equivalent of windfall income and should be spent accordingly.
Calvin Trillin
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I've decided to skip 'holistic'. I don't know what it means, and I don't want to know. That may seem extreme, but I followed the same strategy toward 'Gestalt' and the 'Twist', and lived to tell the tale.
Calvin Trillin
Image
I do remember in high school I wanted to be a disc jockey.
Calvin Trillin
Image
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
Image
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
Image
If General Haig is so smart, why did he finish 214th (out of 310) in his graduating class at West Point? Does that mean there are 213 generals his age who are smarter than he is?
Calvin Trillin
Image
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
Image
Taking pleasure in the dark side may be some sort of occupational hazard for reporters.
Calvin Trillin
Image
Law professors were never like economics professors, a Harvard Law professor told me. If you disagreed with someone, you didn't call him a fool.
Calvin Trillin
Image
There's always a source for humor.
Calvin Trillin
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
The Banh Mi sandwich is really the only good argument for colonialism.
Calvin Trillin