A. J. Liebling Quotes

A. J. Liebling was a prominent American journalist known for his long-term association with ‘The New Yorker’. Counted amongst the most creative journalists of his age, he is remembered for his many quotes and aphorisms, such as “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one”; “People everywhere confuse what they read in newspapers with news”; and “I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better.”

Born into a well-to-do family in New York City, he developed an early interest in writing. Rebellious and independent-minded, he dropped out of Dartmouth College and then enrolled in the School of Journalism at Columbia University. Following his graduation he embarked on a career as a journalist in the sports department of the ‘New York Times’, from where he was supposedly fired. At the insistence of his father he then studied French medieval literature at the Sorbonne in Paris for a year before resuming his journalistic career. He worked as a war correspondent during the World War II, filing many stories from Africa, England, and France. He returned to his regular work after the war and also wrote extensively on topics like food, drinks, and sports.

A. J. Liebling Quotes

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.

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

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.

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

People everywhere confuse what they read in newspapers with news.

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

I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better.

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

I take a grave view of the press. It is the weak slat under the bed of democracy.

The way to write is well, and how is your own business.

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.

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.

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

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.

No sane man can afford to dispense with debilitating pleasures. No ascetic can be considered reliably sane.

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.

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.

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

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.

The primary requisite for writing well about food is a good appetite.

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.’

Inconsiderate to the last, Josef Stalin, a man who never had to meet a deadline, had the bad taste to die in installments.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Any city may have one period of magnificence, like Boston or New Orleans or San Francisco, but it takes a real one to keep renewing itself until the past is perennially forgotten.

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

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

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.

Cynicism is often the shamefaced product of inexperience.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.)

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.

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.

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

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.