In "China Red," Chi tells her fiancé, Sheng, who has left China for America: If some day you should want to be a successful writer, your success will not depend upon how good your writing is, but upon how much it meets with the approval of the mediocre tastes of your readers.
In culinary terms it may mean parboiling meat, then coating it with sweet barbecue sauce flavoured with Liquid Smoke rather than taking the time to cook it slowly over a wood fire.Whereas great barbecue tastes great, even mediocre barbecue tastes pretty good.
I don't know what good wine tastes like, but I do know what mediocre wine tastes like.
Unlike Vince and his cadre of fools, Ari thinks big thoughts, feels big feelings and makes one big mistake after another, while the others — Vince, Drama, Turtle, Eric — shuffle across polished floors with the superficial self-assurance of men so insulated from the real world that they can't even remember what mediocre sushi tastes like.
I know it's important to be a good reader of books; but it's quite as important to be a good watcher of movies, and the contempt with which the audio-visual is held in the educational establishment is a pretty good predictor of a generation's mediocre viewing tastes and habits.
The best coffee in the world can taste mediocre when brewed with shoddy equipment.
AN ACCOUNTANT of extravagant tastes, mediocre business acumen and impeccable political connections, Halim Saad has long symbolised the corporate culture of Malaysia.
Now, says the French graphic artist Jean Pierre Dardenne: "Every time I go back to France, I'm surprised at how mediocre the bread tastes.
She is a hypocritical, ungrateful, spoiled, mediocre journalist with lame taste in men and bad taste in books.
