A. J. Liebling Quotes

People everywhere confuse what they read in newspapers with news.

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

An Englishman teaching an American about food is like the blind leading the one-eyed.

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

The function of the press in society is to inform, but its role in society is to make money.

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.

I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better.

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.

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.

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.'

The only way to write is well and how you do it is your own damn business.

Cynicism is often the shamefaced product of inexperience.

I take a grave view of the press. It is the weak slat under the bed of democracy

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

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.

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 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.

I had an attack of the gout two days before pulling out, and I went limping off to the war instead of coming limping back from it.

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

I can write better than anyone who can write faster.

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.

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.

Freedom of the press belongs to the man who owns one.

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.

No ascetic can be considered reliably sane.