Jimmy Breslin Quotes
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Marvelous Marv was holding down first base. This is like saying Willie Sutton works at your bank.
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I'm on my high school football team and MUST show how much I know.
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The first funeral for Andrew Goodman was at night and it was a lot of work. To begin with they had to kill him.
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Journalism schools are good to get a job, but I don't know what else they are good for. I don't like the word "journalism" to begin with. It's news reporting, and that consists of using your two feet. The only lesson, then, that you could give people is how to climb stairs, because there are no stories on the first floor.
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Don't trust a brilliant idea unless it survives the hangover.
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Speaks cheerful English and in the past has written this language with a paintbrush that talks.
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I became a copy boy. Not for long. I started writing stories.
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Go around with your eyes like a camera. Don't lose it by talking. Go and listen. And work!
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Why something in the public interest such as television news can be fought over, like a chain of hamburger stands, eludes me.
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What you want to do is not go to work. You're not missing a thing. The worst thing I did was start work young.
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Designed by architects with honorable intentions but hands of palsy.
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You see, the Mets are losers, just like nearly everybody else in life. This is the team for the cab driver who gets held up and the guy who loses out on a promotion because he didn't maneuver himself to lunch with the boss enough. It is the team for every guy who has to get out of bed in the morning and go to work for short money on a job he does not like. The Yankees? Who does well enough to root for them, Laurence Rockefeller?
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Out in the ocean, a rope is put around the man's neck. The other end of the rope is attached to an old jukebox and it is thrown overboard. The man invariably follows.
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If a man, for private profit, tears at the public news, does so with the impatience of one who thinks he actually owns the news you get, it is against the national interest.
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Media, the plural of mediocrity.
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When you leave New York you ain't going anywhere.
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I always react to news immediately. That's my business.
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Those of Manhattan are the brokers on Wall Street and they talk of people who went to the same colleges; those from Queens are margin clerks in the back offices and they speak of friends who live in the same neighborhood.
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A job on a newspaper is a special thing. Every day you take something that you found out about, and you put it down and in a matter of hours it becomes a product. Not just a product like a can or something. It is a personal product that people, a lot of people, take the time to sit down and read.
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Rage is ... This is Breslin's full quote: Rage is the only quality which has kept me, or anybody I have ever studied, writing columns for newspapers
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The professional arsonist builds vacant lots for money.
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Newspapers are so boring. How can you read a newspaper that starts with a 51-word lead sentence?
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That's the horrible thing starting out, you get distracted a lot because anything is easier than writing. It's just the same enemy - blank paper.
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The office of president is a bastardized thing, half royalty and half democracy that nobody knows whether to genuflect or spit.
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Politics: where fat, bald, disagreeable men, unable to be candidates themselves, teach a president how to act on a public stage.
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The other feature is a gymnasium named after another dead politician who was gifted with fast and extremely sure hands.
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I think it would be very good if writers and artists take a stand in electoral politics. They've got the ability to put words together that might reach the ears of the people of the city who vote.
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Governments mostly don't do much. And you've also got to understand the level of incompetence out there. Nobody knows what they're doing. They just pose and act as if they know and walk through life and get away with it.
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Journalism should be truthful and entertaining. You know, with news and important facts you can entertain people too. Have a little humor. Life isn't all that deadly all the time, but while you're having fun, tell the truth. If every word of a column is deadly serious, I can't read it. It makes me throw up.
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Precious was one of a large number of people on the street, many of whom appeared to be women; some, like Precious, actually were.
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