A.J. Liebling Quotes

• “People everywhere confuse what they read in newspapers with news.
  ”

  A.J. Liebling

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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.”

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

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• “Cynicism is often the shamefaced product of inexperience.”

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• “Hitler was the archetype of the abstemious man. When the other krauts saw him drink water in the Beer Hall they should have known he was not to be trusted.”

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• “I can write faster than anyone who can write better, and I can write better than anyone who can write faster.”

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• “... in the youth of middle age--square-shouldered, stocky, decisive, blatantly virile-- ...”

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

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• “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.”

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• “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.”

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• “What a madly gay little wine, my dear!" M. Cliquot said, repressing, but not soon enough, a grimace of pain.
  
  "One would say a Tavel of a good year," I cried, "if one were a complete bloody fool." I did not say the second clause aloud.
  
  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.”

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• “What an epithet can be derived from that—“Frivolous philologist!” For thirty years I have been waiting for a chance to use it, but every time I get into an argument with a savant, he turns out to be of some other persuasion—a psychologist, perhaps, or a podiatrist. The neck my knife would fit has never presented itself.”

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• “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.”

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• “Up there in my retreat, I feel the city calling to me. It winks at me with its myriad eyes, and I go out and get stiff as a board. I seek out companionship, and if I do not find friends, I make them. A wonderful, grand old Babylon.”

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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.”

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• “Khrushchev, too, looks like the kind of man his physicians must continually try to diet, and historians will some day correlate these sporadic deprivations, to which he submits “for his own good,” with his public tantrums. If there is to be a world cataclysm, it will probably be set off by skim milk, Melba toast, and mineral oil on the salad.”

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• “​One would say a Tavel of a good year,’ I cried, ‘if one were a complete bloody fool.’ I did not say the second clause aloud.”

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• “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.”

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• “Moreover, these town toasts ate magnificently, and boasted of the quality of the meals their admirers provided for them. It was the age not only of the dazzling public supper but of the cabinet particulier, where even a bourgeois seduction was preceded by an eleven-course meal. With these altruistic sensualists, a menu of superior imagination could prove more effective than a gift of Suez shares; besides, the ladies’ hosts”

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• “It is hard for a writer to call an editor great, because it is natural for him to think of the editor as a writer manqué. It is like asking a thief to approve a fence, or a fighter to speak highly of a manager. “Fighters are sincere,” a fellow with the old pug’s syndrome said to me at a bar once as head wobbled and the hand that held his shot glass shook. “Managers are pimps, they sell our blood.” In the newspaper trade, confirmed reporters think confirmed editors are mediocrities who took the easy way out. These attitudes mark an excess of vanity coupled with a lack of imagination; it never occurs to a writer that anybody could have wanted to be anything else.”

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• “Politics is to the conversation of Louisiana what horse racing is to England’s. In London, anybody from the Queen to a dustman will talk horses; in Louisiana, anyone from a society woman to a bellhop will talk politics. Louisiana politics is of an intensity and complexity that are matched, in my experience, only in the republic of Lebanon.”

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• “I felt the satisfaction because it proved that the world is not going backward, if you can just stay young enough to remember what it was really like when you were really young.”

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