A.J. Liebling Quotes

He felt a giant among pygmies, a pike among crappies, as he stood there among the legislators, most of whom owed him for flavors - special bills passed for their law clients, state jobs for constituents, " contributions" for their personal campaign funds, and so on.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

I can only surmise about what Liebling would make of today's pugilistic dark ages. In his era, fighters fought rematches of close fights, even title fights, almost automatically. Ray Robinson and Jake LaMotta met six times, inconceivable for champions today. In the 1950s a quality pro thought himself underemployed if he had only eight or ten bouts a year, and the amateur scene was thriving. Nowadays pros who make a living from boxing are about as common as Yetis, and amateurs can't get enough fights to learn the rudiments of the craft.

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

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

In the youth of middle age
square-shouldered, stocky, decisive, blatantly virile
...

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

Boxing has always been a primarily urban pastime (whereas the defining suburban sport is auto-racing, in which the machine and its anonymous mechanics hold far greater importance than the driver). When white Americans left the cities, they left boxing as well.

Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one.

The sight of a pretty woman had an airborne chemical effect, like nerve gas. It relaxed the rubber band around his wallet.

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

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 city with one newspaper, or with a morning and an evening paper under one ownership, is like a man with one eye, and often the eye is glass.

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.

Cynicism is often the shamefaced product of inexperience.

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.

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.

People everywhere confuse what they read in newspapers with news.