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Giles Coren Quotes

We’ve collected the best Giles Coren Quotes. Use them as an inspiration.

1
The world‘s most competitive man, my dad. Wouldn’t let us win at Monopoly… he wouldn’t cut any slack for his children. My sister‘s also very, very competitive but she is more concerned than I am with being liked. So she hides it away. I try to make my competitiveness part of my charm.
Giles Coren
2
My dad Alan loved Westerns and we watched them together when there wasn’t much else on TV. I had toy cowboys I’d call Richard Widmark or Gregory Peck and we’d restage the Battle of the Alamo.
Giles Coren
3
Being a success in the world, having total control of one’s life, is about being able to take or leave things.
Giles Coren
4
My dad was very successful as a journalist, so I didn’t want to be one. I wanted to be a novelist.
Giles Coren
5
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.
Giles Coren
6
I have a tailor now, I have a doctor, a wine merchant, a jeweller, a gardener, a cleaner, and a nanny. It was clearly ridiculous that I did not have a hairdresser. So I got one.
Giles Coren
7
As a broadly left-wing, environmentally aware urban believer in anthropogenic global warming, I am all for a total ban on motor vehicles.
Giles Coren
8
How clever am I? I’m really quite clever. I mean, look, I’ve got a first-class degree from Oxford.
Giles Coren
9
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.
Giles Coren
10
I always say what I think to be amusing.
Giles Coren
11
I always feel quite Jewish but I used to deny it until I was in my twenties.
Giles Coren
12
World cross-fertilization is fantastic. Immigration across the world has led to all kinds of fantastic new and exciting kinds of food being available. And there’s all kinds of different kinds of restaurants.
Giles Coren
13
I have quite good general knowledge and I had a very drilled education from an early age. I do know more than most people. I know more than most journalists. I know more than most columnists on big, important newspapers.
Giles Coren
14
I have Gordon Ramsay to thank for my TV career because Channel 4 spent a long time trying to find him a sidekick for ‘The F Word‘, then he suggested me, knowing I’d stand up to him.
Giles Coren
15
We’ve got rid of subeditors because we don’t need them. Because they were never necessary. They were just fetchers and gophers. They had a job, which has been superannuated by technology.
Giles Coren
16
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.
Giles Coren
17
I’m not a mad, crazy foodie. But I have strong opinions and I know a lot about food.
Giles Coren
18
Gradually, I developed opinions about food, and my French friends taught me that you have to complain in a restaurant.
Giles Coren
19
There is nothing wrong with getting a bus. Nothing in any way demeaning about boarding a huge smelly communal vehicle that will rumble noisily and very slowly in the vague direction of the place you need to get to and then dump you half a mile away in the freezing wind and rain.
Giles Coren
20
Mineral water is a preposterous vanity, either bottled in glass which is stupidly heavy to freight, or in plastic that ends up in one of the plastic patches the size of Texas occupying our oceans.
Giles Coren
21
My dad never really wrote what he thought. None of his inner rage and darkness and problems, which we all have, made it on to the page. For him, writing was a process of making everything appear funny.
Giles Coren
22
So what on Earth there isn’t to like about New York? I don’t know. But what you do also have is a load of very ordinary restaurants which you make a terrible fuss about which are really only very average. Which is fine. One doesn’t go to New York for the food.
Giles Coren
23
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.
Giles Coren
24
Hipsters being hipsters, coolness and inaccessibility have overtaken all other concerns. Food no longer matters. Even burgers are too foody. All a restaurant needs to be now is a place with bricks and exposed plumbing where you can take an edgy selfie that will make your friends feel like they are missing out.
Giles Coren
25
Of course you can get a decent mouthful of food in New York. You can get a decent mouthful of food in Nairobi. You can get a decent mouthful of food in Warsaw or Chad if you look hard enough. It’s just I wouldn’t actually go there looking for the food.
Giles Coren
26
I had become mean and stupid and deliberately hurtful because that is what is expected of restaurant critics. Of critics in general.
Giles Coren
27
It doesn’t matter how much of a hurry you think you are in. Be one of the people for whom ten minutes does not make a difference.
Giles Coren
28
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.
Giles Coren
29
I come from a country where there’s a reputation for bad press.
Giles Coren
30
When I was 16 my dad taught me to drive too. Furiously. Unable to understand why I couldn’t already do it – for driving, to him, was innate in the human. It was what separated us from the apes. And from the French, who weren’t much good at it either.
Giles Coren
31
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.
Giles Coren
32
Where my dad taught me everything about writing, Graham Paterson, who gave me my first job at The Times, taught me everything about journalism, which is that it’s no big deal, and it’s more important to have a glass of wine.
Giles Coren
33
When I tell people I spent almost a year in Paris, I know they imagine something out of a Woody Allen movie, which it wasn’t, of course. I was just working in a clothes shop, but I was aware that it was exciting.
Giles Coren