Calvin Trillin

“Paull has his own style, which is folksy, not canned.Religion? He's got one. His prophet's Ayn Rand.By Rand's eerie theories he's fervently gripped,So he won't do flip-flops. He long ago flipped.”

“All White House hopefuls we forewarn:You'll have to prove that you were born.Before Trump hits the state of granite,He must identify the planetWhere he first took on human form - A place where blowhards are the norm.”

“I am firmly committed to the proposition that whoever is in power is exceedingly silly.... And that goes for the opposition as well.”

“understand what Ernest Becker meant when he said something like ‘To live fully is to live with an awareness of the rumble of terror that underlies everything,”

“your children are either the center of your life or they’re not, and the rest is commentary”

“I never did very well in math-I could never seem to persuade the teacher that I hadn't meant my answers literally.”

“Was the Buffalo chicken wing inventedwhen Teressa Bellissimo thought of splitting it in half and deep frying it and serving it with celery and blue-cheese dressing? Was it invented when John Young started using mambo sauceand thought of elevating wings into a specialty?”

“I suppose it's possible that the Sundance Kid didn't like to make much of his birthdays — they may have struck him as just another reminder that his draw was getting slower by the year—but what if he truly liked a major celebration? What if he looked forward every year to marking the day of his birth with what they used to call in the West 'a real wingding, with pink balloons and a few survivors'?”

“Going out? Are you going out? He's not going out? What do you mean he's not going out? Are you out here because you're still mad that they moved the Dodgers to L.A.? Are you going out or not? You're not going out? I guess you're not going out — huh? You mean go out parking in the evenings? Are you going out to park? Mr. Tepper, he asked at one point, did you ever — if you were in the middle of an interesting story in the paper or perhaps an interesting conversation with somebody who dropped in to talk to you while you were parking — notice that the meter had run out and therefore go out and put more money in the meter? If we're both keeping an eye out, what does it hurt?”

“Would I be commenting on Amy Fisher?Was that the sort of subject that someone who hoped to become poet laureate should discuss? Would those British laureates who had traditionally written about royal birthdays and royal jubilees have dealt with such goings on?”

“By the way, did you fellows know that a hummingbird weighs as much as a quarter? Do you think a hummingbird also weighs the same as two dimes and a nickel? But then she asked a question of her own: How do they weigh a hummingbird?”

“Why in the world are you a Republican?”

“Do my ears deceive me, or can I actually hear the sounds of worms turning? You say a turning worm makes no sound? But how about a chorus of turning worms?”

“Daddy, how come in Kansas City the bagels taste like just round bread?”

“If Lincoln freed the slaves and preserved the Union, how come'Lincolnesque' just means tall?”

“Every good idea sooner or later degenerates into hard work.”

“When someone reaches middle age, people he knows begin to get put in charge of things, and knowing what he knows about the people who are being put in charge of things scares the hell out of him.”

“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?”

“She believed in the principle of enoughness." from "About Alice”

“The price of purity is purists.”

“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.”

“Health food makes me sick.”