Giles Coren Quotes

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.

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.

Being a success in the world, having total control of one’s life, is about being able to take or leave things.

My dad was very successful as a journalist, so I didn’t want to be one. I wanted to be a novelist.

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.

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.

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

How clever am I? I’m really quite clever. I mean, look, I’ve got a first-class degree from Oxford.

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.

I always say what I think to be amusing.

I always feel quite Jewish but I used to deny it until I was in my twenties.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I’m not a mad, crazy foodie. But I have strong opinions and I know a lot about food.

Gradually, I developed opinions about food, and my French friends taught me that you have to complain in a restaurant.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I had become mean and stupid and deliberately hurtful because that is what is expected of restaurant critics. Of critics in general.

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.

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.

I come from a country where there’s a reputation for bad press.

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.

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.

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.

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.