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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

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Calvin Trillin
Age: 88
Born: 1935
Born: December 5
Journalist
Novelist
Poet
Kansas City
Missouri
Calvin Marshall Trillin
Television
Chef
Saigon
American
Panic
Embassy
People
Final
Chefs
Finals
Helicopters
Push
Compound
Fronts
Compounds
Front
Grounds
Sitting
Shouting
Snatching

More quotes by 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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Being on a book tour is a lot easier than reporting.
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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.
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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.
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I never did very well in math - I could never seem to persuade the teacher that I hadn't meant my answers literally.
Calvin Trillin
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It was a given in our family that my father was a grocer so that I wouldn't have to be.
Calvin Trillin
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I've written three books you could think of as memoirs.
Calvin Trillin
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There's always a source for humor.
Calvin Trillin
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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.
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I like chili, but not enough to discuss it with someone from Texas.
Calvin Trillin
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The Banh Mi sandwich is really the only good argument for colonialism.
Calvin Trillin
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I don't cook. I don't know anything about food. I've never reviewed a restaurant.
Calvin Trillin
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Following the Rumanian tradition, garlic is used in excess to keep the vampires away... Following the Jewish tradition, a dispenser of schmaltz (liquid chicken fat) is kept on the table to give the vampires heartburn if they get through the garlic defense.
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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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Why in the world are you a Republican?
Calvin Trillin
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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
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Everybody is who he was in high school.
Calvin Trillin
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Anybody who doesn't think that the best hamburger place in teh world is in his home town is a sissy.
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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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