A. J. Liebling Quotes
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If you just try long enough and hard enough, you can always manage to boot yourself in the posterior.
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I take a grave view of the press. It is the weak slat under the bed of democracy
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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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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.
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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.
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A city with one newspaper... is like a man with one eye, and often the eye is glass.
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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.)
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Cynicism is often the shamefaced product of inexperience.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Chicago seems a big city instead of merely a large place.
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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.
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People everywhere confuse what they read in newspapers with news.
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I used to be shy about ordering a steak after I had eaten a steak sandwich, but I got used to it.
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I can write better than anyone who can write faster.
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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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An Englishman teaching an American about food is like the blind leading the one-eyed.
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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.
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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.
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Henry Miller may write about revelers self-woven into a human hooked rug, because his ecstasy is solemn.
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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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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.
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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.
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No ascetic can be considered reliably sane.
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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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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.
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Newspapers write about other newspapers with circumspection, ... about themselves with awe, and only after mature reflection.
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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.'
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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.
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