Calvin Trillin Quotes

Satire is fascinating stuff. It's deadly serious, and when politics begin to break down, there is a drift towards satire, because it's the only thing that makes any sense.

Hyperbole was to Lyndon Johnson what oxygen is to life.

This is a ridiculous heat wave we're in right now, and to contribute, Newt Gingrich said that for the entire month of June, he will stop blowing hot air.

Nobody gets irony anymore, as we are now living in the post-ironic age. Once George Bush gets a library, our irony is dead.

If a politician, during a campaign, finds it necessary to resort to flattery, he should spread it on, not in thin layers, but with a trowel, or better yet, a shovel.

If George W. Bush is a reformer, I'm an astronaut!

For [Donald] Trump, popularity equals truth... He understands that in American public discourse, it's hard to say the people are wrong.

Donald Trump refuses to be politically correct. And just to be safe, he refuses to be correct.

Ksenia Sobchak as president is like Sergei Shnurov as an artist. It's satire. It's a very high-level art project.

Your country becomes funnier the further you are from it. I remember seeing Boris Johnson on the news when I was in Hong Kong, and he looked so much more ridiculous.

Today Obama was seen leaving the White House in a nurse's uniform on a flight to Cuba to smother Castro with a pillow.

I did meet Mickey Mouse in California, and he seems to be writing the Labour party's economic policy at the moment.

You can't write good satirical fiction in America because reality will quickly outdo anything you might invent.

The Democrats should have an empty chair on stage for the entire DNC, and when anyone asks who it belongs to, they can say Osama bin Laden.

We have to be a little cautious about not trying to kill a gnat with an atom bomb. The performances are so utterly absurd regarding the "post-truth" moment that the proper response might best be ridicule.

This man is the bee's knees, Arthur, he is the wasp's nipples. He is, I would go so far as to say, the entire set of erogenous zones of every major flying insect of the Western world.

If the British prose style is Churchillian, America is the tobacco auctioneer, the barker; Runyon, Lardner, W.W., the traveling salesman who can sell the world the Brooklyn Bridge every day, can put anything over on you and convince you that tomatoes grow at the South Pole.

Collin Singleton could no more stay cool than a blue whale could stay skinny or Bangladesh could stay rich

People often ask me where I stand politically. It's not that I disagree with Bush's economic policy or his foreign policy, it's that I believe he was a child of Satan sent here to destroy the planet Earth. Little to the left.

You listen to a politician making a speech, and it is like hearing nothing. Whereas, music is unmistakably music. The thing about music is that nobody listens to it unless it's real. I don't think that you can fool anybody for too long in music. And you certainly can't fool everybody.

He was so narrow minded that if he fell on a pin it would blind him in both eyes.

Washington is rigged for the big guys - and no person has more consistently called them out for it than Jon Stewart. Good luck, Jon!

No short-haired, yellow-bellied, son of tricky dicky Is gonna mother hubbard soft soap me With just a pocketful of soap.

Haven't you heard? I sleep every night in the deep freezer!

I think I was 5ft 9in at birth.