Calvin Trillin

Calvin Marshall Trillin (born December 5, 1935) is an American journalist, humorist, and novelist.

Sourced

• Money not spent on a luxury one considered even briefly is the equivalent of windfall income and should be spent accordingly.
  • "Alice's Law of Compensatory Cash Flow"in Alice, Let's Eat (1978)

• Health food makes me sick.

Unsourced

• I never did very well in math - I could never persuade my teachers that many of my answers were meant to be ironic.

• Anybody caught selling macrame in public should be dyed a natural color and hung out to dry.

• I don't care where I sit, as long as I get fed.

• 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 the article is still on the presses.

• Marriage is not merely sharing the fettucini, but sharing the burden of finding the fettucini restaurant in the first place.

• Marriage is part of a sort of 50's revival package that's back in vogue along with neckties and naked ambition.

• The average trade book has a shelf life of between milk and yogurt, except for books by any member of the Irving Wallace family - they have preservatives.

• The most remarkable thing about my mother is that for thirty years she served the family nothing but leftovers. The original meal has never been found.

• As far as I'm concerned, "whom" is a word that was invented to make everyone sound like a butler.

• Even today, well-brought-up English girls are taught by their mothers to boil all veggies for at least a month and a half, just in case one of the dinner guests turns up without his teeth.

• My last name is a number

• 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.

• Following the Rumanian tradition, garlic is used in excess to keep the vampires away.

• I never eat in a restaurant that's over a hundred feet off the ground and won't stand still.

• 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. The food in such places is so tasteless because the members associate spices and garlic with just the sort of people they're trying to keep out.

• Keeping off a large weight loss is a phenomenon about as common in American medicine as an impoverished dermatologist.

• The question about those aromatic advertisements that perfume companies are having stitched into magazines these days is this: under the freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment, is smelling up the place a constitutionally protected form of expression?

• There is no question that Rumanian-Jewish food is heavy. One meal is equal in heaviness, I would guess, to eight or nine years of steady mung-bean eating.

• 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.