18 Giles Coren Quotes

Giles Coren quotes

1. I get so excited when I know I'm going to a good restaurant, then, when I do the review, I write myself up into such a frenzy that I have to go out and eat all over again.

2. Some critics think the way I write is somehow disrespectful to food. But how can you write a restaurant column without being entertaining? You might as well not get up in the morning. People complain my sense of humour is puerile but the reason I have a job is because my sense of humour is puerile.

3. My dad was undeniably famous when I was a kid - he was on Wogan and Clive James and the radio every week, but as far as I was concerned he wasn't famous enough. My best friend was Ben Brooke-Taylor. His dad Tim was in The Goodies - that was famous.

4. I wanted to be a great literary novelist so that people would eventually talk about Alan Coren the scribbler and father of the great Giles.

5. The Jewish religion has it completely right in maintaining you should think very carefully about what you eat.

6. I am very snobby. My family is Orthodox so I would never go to a Reform rabbi.

1. A man of strong opinions is one thing. But a man whose strong opinions depend entirely on how he is feeling in that instant is a disastrous thing in a city of 10 million people just trying to muddle through.

2. As a broadly left-wing, environmentally aware urban believer in anthropogenic global warming, I am all for a total ban on motor vehicles.

3. Not since Ancient Greece have cities been thought of as the ideal living environment for humans. And that was so long ago it predates the invention of trousers.

4. In the beginning, we huddled in cities for our own protection. We built walls around them with slits through which to fire arrows at scary, cross-eyed rural people, and brought our food and family inside because they were the safest places to be.

5. It was fine for my Polish Ashkenazi forebears to live on dumplings and potatoes, because they laboured in the fields. But that diet is unsuitable for an urban lifestyle.

6. I was 41 when I became a dad. I try to be as much fun as my father was, but I'm at home more - and less of a disciplinarian.

7. Instant gratification is bringing this planet to its knees.

8. People think you get paid millions by the BBC if you're famous, but me? Me, I'm in the Premier Inn in Gillingham.

9. All I care about is that people who like me think I'm funny. I get on with writing pretty straight-down the line, old-fashioned stuff.

10. Gentile smoked salmon is all... muscular and smells of smoke. It's not very fatty. They don't understand - smoked salmon should be almost spreadable! So you give them the real stuff and they can't believe how delicious it is.

11. I tried to leave the city once, for one of those other places. And, my God, the silence. I could hear myself think, and found that I wasn't. I am not designed to be lonely as a cloud.

12. As drivers desert the city I find myself clinging more and more to my father's belief that a man without a car is not really a man.