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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

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If law school is so hard to get through... how come there are so many lawyers?
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Marriage is not merely sharing the fettucini, but sharing the burden of finding the fettucini restaurant in the first place.
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What interests me is what you might call vernacular writing, writing that connects you to a place.
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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.
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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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At American weddings, the quality of the food is in inverse proportion to the social position of the bride and groom.
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If Lincoln freed the slaves and preserved the Union, how come 'Lincolnesque' just means tall?
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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.
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I don't cook. I don't know anything about food. I've never reviewed a restaurant.
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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.
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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.
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There's always a source for humor.
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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.
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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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If it's inappropriate to write about, if there's nothing funny about it, then it's not funny.
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Money not spent on a luxury one considered even briefly is the equivalent of windfall income and should be spent accordingly.
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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.
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I like chili, but not enough to discuss it with someone from Texas.
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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.
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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.
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