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 Sunday World was a dry-stall interlude in my wanderings.

A. J. Liebling

Categorized in : Fall Mean Christmas

People everywhere confuse what they read in newspapers with news.

A. J. Liebling

political print-media people

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

A. J. Liebling

teaching food travel

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

A. J. Liebling

politics media-control funny

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

A. J. Liebling

cooking writing food

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

A. J. Liebling

powerful humorous witty

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

A. J. Liebling

roles society anger

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.'

A. J. Liebling

girl class running

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.

A. J. Liebling

wine stupid men

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.

A. J. Liebling

gout war two

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.

A. J. Liebling

enough remember world

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.

A. J. Liebling

light loss food

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

A. J. Liebling

he-man media men

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.

A. J. Liebling

hero war children

I can write better than anyone who can write faster.

A. J. Liebling

i-can faster writing

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

A. J. Liebling

lasts taste men

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.

A. J. Liebling

politician louisiana principles

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

A. J. Liebling

mature reflection writing

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.

A. J. Liebling

organization president character

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.

A. J. Liebling

new-orleans real past

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. J. Liebling

writing pay firsts