Quote

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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Calvin Trillin
Age: 88
Born: 1935
Born: December 5
Journalist
Novelist
Poet
Kansas City
Missouri
Calvin Marshall Trillin
Nothing
Wouldn
Writing
Source
Something
Humor
Selects
Make
Sort
Inappropriate
Always
Politics
Plus
Time
Funny
Jokes
Often
Later
Write
Okay

More quotes by 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
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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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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.
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Being on a book tour is a lot easier than reporting.
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Keeping off a large weight loss is a phenomenon about as common in American medicine as an impoverished dermatologist.
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Why in the world are you a Republican?
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If law school is so hard to get through... how come there are so many lawyers?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Avoid restaurants with names that are improbable descriptions, such as the Purple Goose, the Blue Kangaroo or the Quilted Orangutan.
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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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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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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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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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When you're writing, you are robbed of your delivery.
Calvin Trillin
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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.
Calvin Trillin
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If Lincoln freed the slaves and preserved the Union, how come 'Lincolnesque' just means tall?
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Everybody is who he was in high school.
Calvin Trillin