A. J. Liebling quotes
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“People everywhere confuse what they read in newspapers with news.”
-- A. J. LieblingSource : The New Yorker, en.wikiquote.org. April 7, 1956.
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“An Englishman teaching an American about food is like the blind leading the one-eyed.”
-- A. J. Liebling -
“The primary requisite for writing well about food is a good appetite.”
-- A. J. LieblingSource : A. J. Liebling (2005). “Just Enough Liebling: Classic Work by the Legendary New Yorker Writer”, p.27, Macmillan
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“Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.”
-- A. J. LieblingSource : New Yorker, 14 May 1960
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“I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better.”
-- A. J. Liebling -
“No ascetic can be considered reliably sane.”
-- 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 -
“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. LieblingSource : A. J. Liebling (2005). “Just Enough Liebling: Classic Work by the Legendary New Yorker Writer”, p.524, Macmillan
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“I met a keen observer who gave me a tip: 'If you run across a restaurant where you often see priests eating with priests, or sporting girls with sporting girls, you may be confident that it is good. Those are two classes of people who like to eat well and get their money's worth.'”
-- A. J. LieblingSource : A. J. Liebling (2016). “Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris”, p.59, North Point Press
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“A city with one newspaper... is like a man with one eye, and often the eye is glass.”
-- A. J. Liebling -
“Freedom of the press belongs to the man who owns one.”
-- A. J. Liebling -
“I can write better than anyone who can write faster,”
-- A. J. Liebling -
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“If the first requisite for writing well about food is a good appetite, the second is to put in your apprenticeship as a feeder when you have enough money to pay the check but not enough to produce indifference of the total.”
-- A. J. Liebling -
“The primary requisite for writing well about food is a good appetite. Without this, it is impossible to accumulate, within the allotted span, enough experience of eating to have anything worth setting down.”
-- 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 -
“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 -
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“The fighter (like the writer) must stand alone. If he loses he cannot call an executive conference and throw off on a vice president or the assistant sales manager. He is consequently resented by fractional characters who cannot live outside an organization.”
-- A. J. LieblingSource : A. J. Liebling (2014). “The Sweet Science”, p.5, Macmillan
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“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 -
“If you just try long enough and hard enough, you can always manage to boot yourself in the posterior.”
-- A. J. Liebling -
“The only way to write is well and how you do it is your own damn business.”
-- A. J. Liebling -
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“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 -
“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 -
“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 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. LieblingSource : Abbott Joseph Liebling (1970). “The Earl of Louisiana”, p.19, LSU Press
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“I take a grave view of the press. It is the weak slat under the bed of democracy”
-- 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 -
“Chicago seems a big city instead of merely a large place.”
-- A. J. Liebling -
“If a boxer ever went as crazy as Nijinsky all the wowsers in the world would be screaming 'punch-drunk.' Well, who hit Nijinsky? And why isn't there a campaign against ballet? It gives girls thick legs”
-- A. J. Liebling -
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“There is no concept more generally cherished by publishers than that of the Undeserving Poor.”
-- A. J. LieblingSource : A. J. Liebling (2005). “Just Enough Liebling: Classic Work by the Legendary New Yorker Writer”, p.22, Macmillan
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“The science of booby-trapping has taken a good deal of the fun out of following hot on the enemy's heels.”
-- A. J. LieblingSource : A. J. Liebling (2004). “Mollie and Other War Pieces”, p.121, U of Nebraska Press
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“The function of the press in society is to inform, but its role in society is to make money.”
-- A. J. Liebling -
“Cynicism is often the shamefaced product of inexperience.”
-- A. J. LieblingSource : A. J. Liebling (2005). “Just Enough Liebling: Classic Work by the Legendary New Yorker Writer”, p.20, Macmillan
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“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 -
“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. LieblingSource : A. J. Liebling (2005). “Just Enough Liebling: Classic Work by the Legendary New Yorker Writer”, p.411, Macmillan
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“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
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