Giles Coren Quotes

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Giles Coren

Profession : Writer

Birth : July 29, 1969

I'm just a bit frustrated that in London we make such an effort to ape the New York restaurant scene. I have good friends who ape the New York restaurant scene and do it brilliantly. None of them would claim that the primary reason for going to their restaurant was the food.

Giles Coren

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

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

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

Giles Coren

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

I think unionization of labour is a great thing.

Giles Coren

I sleep nine hours every night, I have a little nap after lunch, and, if I'm going out for dinner, I sneak in an extra one before I head out.

Giles Coren

I used to be a very angry person, I used to throw things and break them. Then I had five years of constant psycho-analysis, and I don't get angry any more.

Giles Coren

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

Giles Coren

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

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

Giles Coren

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

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

Giles Coren

I always say what I think to be amusing.

Giles Coren

I used to be so angry. I think back to my early days as a critic in the late 1990s, and I blush. I would go swaggering into restaurants in some ridiculous tramp disguise, challenging them to mistreat me, order the things I was least likely to enjoy, then hurl my plate aside in a fury and demand to see the manager.

Giles Coren

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

Giles Coren

I let the other reviewers eat the bad meals, so that I didn't have to, and my wife and I went out only for the good stuff. And I wrote mostly positive reviews. Not only. But mostly. And, ooooh, it felt an awful lot better.

Giles Coren

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

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

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