Calvin Trillin Quotes
I never did very well in math - I could never seem to persuade the teacher that I hadn't meant my answers literally.
Quotes to Explore
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I have been offered a lot for my work, but never everything.
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We lived on isolated farms and ranches, far from anybody, and when I was young I knew very few other kids, so I lived to a great extent in my imagination.
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If I were to continue to work in an established mode, it stands to reason the work would be limited by this - that it would never surpass the prior work in quality.
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Love can never be fully explained.
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When you're in a songwriting class, and you write a song, and you hand it in to a teacher to grade, I'm still going to say that it's a really awesome song whether I got an A or a D. I learned to stick to my guns and take the tools as tools and not as rules.
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Before I became a chief minister, I never thought that one day I'd be the chief minister.
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One of the biggest mistakes people make is to think that what you need to write a novel is imagination, creativity and a facility with words. Yes, you need all those things, but a novel is a highly complex organism that needs to be dealt with in quite a logical manner.
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I feel that Christian music is a subculture directed towards the Christians. It's not really being exposed to non-Christians and it's not really created for non-Christians, so non-Christians almost never hear any of this music.
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I've never been more famous than I was, suddenly, in 1986.
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One of the virtues of being very young is that you don't let the facts get in the way of your imagination.
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Things are never perfect, so I never get too high about things, or get too down about things anymore.
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I never was a popular kid in class.
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I read a lot of comic books and any kind of thing I could find. One day, a teacher found me. She grabbed my comic book and tore it up. I was really upset, but then she brought in a pile of books from her own library. That was the best thing that ever happened to me.
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I have never advocated war except as a means of peace.
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I have never broken a contract in my career.
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I could never take orders from anyone.
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Money is a bubble that never pops. It's a consensus hallucination.
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We both agreed that Stalin was determined to hold out against the Germans. He told us he'd never let them get to Moscow. But if he was wrong, they'd go back to the Urals and fight. They'd never surrender.
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What joins the Americans one to another is not a common ancestry, language or race, but a shared work of the imagination that looks forward to the making of a future, not backward to the insignia of the past. Their enterprise is underwritten by a Constitution that allows for the widest horizons of sight and the broadest range of expression, supports the liberties of the people as opposed to the ambitions of the state, and stands as premise for a narrative rather than plan for an invasion or a monument. The narrative was always plural; not one story, many stories.
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The novel is a seduction; a reader has to be seduced.
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There is no 20-year period in American history when stocks lost money.
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I was utterly miserable, and yet fearless as I had never been. I was carefree. It was like dying. It would be foolish to worry about anything while one died.
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I never did very well in math - I could never seem to persuade the teacher that I hadn't meant my answers literally.
