Quotes from A. J. Liebling

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

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.

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

People everywhere confuse what they read in newspapers with news.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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