Giles Coren Quotes

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Giles Coren

Profession : Writer

Birth : July 29, 1969

Personally I ride a bicycle, travel by train and bus and campaign tirelessly for a car taxation system that will hammer ignorant, selfish, petty, fat, spoilt, stupid car abusers into giving up their addiction and walking.

Giles Coren

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

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

The first thing I remember is that my dad had a big iron Olivetti typewriter and he worked all night. He was a staffer at Punch but in the evening he wrote columns for the Evening Standard and The Times.

Giles Coren

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.

Giles Coren

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

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

Giles Coren

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

When I write I inhabit a personality that is and is not me.

Giles Coren

The notion of getting pleasure from food has gone too far; we can also get pleasure from anticipating a meal, and from not being quite sated.

Giles Coren

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

The way I write possibly shouldn't be turned on serious things.

Giles Coren

Instant gratification is bringing this planet to its knees.

Giles Coren

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.

Giles Coren

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

My time in Paris was an education in both the grimness of a relentless, grinding day job and the joys of nights in glittering restaurants. The good fortune of my life, which has been to turn those glittering nights into my job, all came from there.

Giles Coren

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

Giles Coren

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

Giles Coren

At home, we have fish and greens, fish and greens - maybe salmon steak with curried lentils. No poncy cooking goes on, we don't have dinner parties, we don't entertain.

Giles Coren

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