A. J. Liebling Quotes - Page 2

There is no concept more generally cherished by publishers than that of the Undeserving Poor.

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.

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.

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.

Newspapers write about other newspapers with circumspection, ... about themselves with awe, and only after mature reflection.

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

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.The Sunday World was a dry-stall interlude in my wanderings.

If you just try long enough and hard enough, you can always manage to boot yourself in the posterior.

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.

Chicago seems a big city instead of merely a large place.

I used to be shy about ordering a steak after I had eaten a steak sandwich, but I got used to it.

A city with one newspaper... is like a man with one eye, and often the eye is glass.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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

Forget that New Orleans is actually a little like the Combat Zone with French cooking, it still happens to be part of the great state of Louisiana where people play the political game the same way it's played in Lebanon. The place is one layer after another of tribes, factions and at least a million laughs.

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.