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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

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Calvin Trillin
Age: 89
Born: 1935
Born: December 5
Journalist
Novelist
Poet
Kansas City
Missouri
Calvin Marshall Trillin
People
Page
Pages
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More quotes by 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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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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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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I like chili, but not enough to discuss it with someone from Texas.
Calvin Trillin
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Canadians are very well behaved, they don't throw their food.
Calvin Trillin
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There's always a source for humor.
Calvin Trillin
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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.
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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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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The ceiling on taxation of capital gains reflects the national belief that speculation is a more worthwhile way to make a living than work.
Calvin Trillin
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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.
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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The Banh Mi sandwich is really the only good argument for colonialism.
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
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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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I don't cook. I don't know anything about food. I've never reviewed a restaurant.
Calvin Trillin
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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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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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Avoid restaurants with names that are improbable descriptions, such as the Purple Goose, the Blue Kangaroo or the Quilted Orangutan.
Calvin Trillin
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Everybody is who he was in high school.
Calvin Trillin