A. J. Liebling Quotes

34 Sourced Quotes

Southern political personalities, like sweet corn, travel badly. They lose flavor with every hundred yards away from the patch. By the time they reach New York, they are like Golden Bantam that has been trucked up from Texas - stale and unprofitable. The consumer forgets that the corn tastes different where it grows.

A. J. Liebling
People everywhere confuse
What they read in the newspapers with news.

A. J. Liebling
I can write faster than anybody who can write better, and I can write better than anybody who can write faster.

A. J. Liebling
A Louisiana politician can't afford to let his animosities carry him away, and still less his principles, although there is seldom difficulty in that department.

A. J. Liebling
The science of booby-trapping has taken a good deal of the fun out of following hot on the enemy's heels.

A. J. Liebling
The way to write is well, and how is your own business. Nothing else on the subject makes sense.

A. J. Liebling
It is impossible for me to estimate how many of my early impressions of the world, correct and the opposite, came to me through newspapers. Homicide, adultery, no-hit pitching, and Balkanism were concepts that, left to my own devices, I would have encountered much later in life.

A. J. Liebling
Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.

A. J. Liebling
The pattern of a newspaperman's life is like the plot of 'Black Beauty.' Sometimes he finds a kind master who gives him a dry stall and an occasional bran mash in the form of a Christmas bonus, sometimes he falls into the hands of a mean owner who drives him in spite of spavins and expects him to live on potato peelings.

A. J. Liebling
The world isn't going backward, if you can just stay young enough to remember what it was really like when you were really young.

A. J. Liebling
When I watch a fight, I like to study one boxer's problem, solve it, and then communicate my solution vocally.

A. J. Liebling
My old friend looked at me with a new respect. He was discovering in me a capacity for hypocrisy that he had never credited me with before.

A. J. Liebling
In the light of what Proust wrote with so mild a stimulus, it is the world's loss that he did not have a heartier appetite. On a dozen Gardiner's Island oysters, a bowl of clam chowder, a peck of steamers, some bay scallops, three sauteed soft-shelled crabs, a few ears of fresh picked corn, a thin swordfish steak of generous area, a pair of lobsters, and a Long Island Duck, he might have written a masterpiece.

A. J. Liebling
Henry Miller may write about revelers self-woven into a human hooked rug, because his ecstasy is solemn.

A. J. Liebling
Any city may have one period of magnificence, like Boston or New Orleans or San Francisco, but it takes a real one to keep renewing itself until the past is perennially forgotten.

A. J. Liebling
The country's present supply of foreign news depends largely on how best a number of dry goods merchants in New York think they can sell underwear.

A. J. Liebling
There is a healthy American newspaper tradition of not taking yourself seriously It is the story you must take that way... And if you do take yourself seriously, according to this sound convention, you are supposed to do your best not to let anyone else know about it. (Like bed-wetting.)

A. J. Liebling
It is an anomaly that information, the one thing most necessary to our survival as choosers of our own way, should be a commodity subject to the same merchandising rules as chewing gum.

A. J. Liebling
Our hypothetical rich client might even have ordered a Pommard, because it was listed at a higher price...He would have never learned [about other wines]. A man who is rich in his adolescence is almost doomed to be a dilettante at table. This is not because all millionaires are stupid but because they are not impelled to experiment.

A. J. Liebling
News is like the tilefish which appears in great schools off the Atlantic Coast some years and then vanishes, no one knows whither or for how long. Newspapers might employ these periods searching for the breeding grounds of news, but they prefer to fill up with stories about Kurdled Kurds or Calvin Coolidge, until the banks close or a Hitler marches, when they are as surprised as their readers.

A. J. Liebling
If there is any way you can get colder than you do when you sleep in a bedding roll on the ground in a tent in southern Tunisia two hours before dawn, I don't know about it.

A. J. Liebling
No sane man can afford to dispense with debilitating pleasures; no ascetic can be considered reliably sane. Hitler was the archetype of the abstemious man.

A. J. Liebling
The subject [of Stalin's death] permitted a rare blend of invective and speculation—both Hearst papers, as I recall, ran cartoons of Stalin being rebuffed at the gates of Heaven, where Hearst had no correspondents—and I have seldom enjoyed a week of newspaper reading more.

A. J. Liebling
You can hope for lucky encounters only if you walk around a lot.

A. J. Liebling
Inconsiderate to the last, Josef Stalin, a man who never had to meet a deadline, had the bad taste to die in installments.

A. J. Liebling
As a result of its generous stand [Robert Maynard Hutchins' controversial policy of admitting students after their second year of high-school], the University of Chicago's undergraduate college acts as the greatest magnet for neurotic juveniles since the Children's Crusade, with Robert Maynard Hutchins…playing the role of Stephen the Shepherd Boy.

A. J. Liebling
Last week, I had to offer my publisher a bottle that was far too good for him, simply because there was nothing between the insulting and the superlative.

A. J. Liebling
To the Parisians, and especially to the children, all Americans are now 'heros du cinema.' This is particularly disconcerting to sensitive war correspondents, if any, aware, as they are, that these innocent thanks belong to those American combat troops who won the beachhead and then made the breakthrough. There are few such men in Paris.

A. J. Liebling
A man's taste is formed more by his culture, his profession, and the period in which he is young than by his race or politics.

A. J. Liebling
The primary requisite for writing well about food is a good appetite.

A. J. Liebling