The largest website for English phrases and quotes

The largest website for English phrases and quotes

Category: A.J. Liebling

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.

Money, Good, Writing

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.

Good, Experience, Writing

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

Blind, American, Englishman

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.

Life, Beauty, Black

Hitler was the archetype of the abstemious man. When the other krauts saw him drink water in the Beer Hall they should have known he was not to be trusted.

cuisine, france, hitler, paris

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

writers, writing

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

newspapers, journalism

It is hard for a writer to call an editor great, because it is natural for him to think of the editor as a writer manqué. It is like asking a thief to approve a fence, or a fighter to speak highly of a manager. “Fighters are sincere,” a fellow with the old pug’s syndrome said to me at a bar once as head wobbled and the hand that held his shot glass shook. “Managers are pimps, they sell our blood.” In the newspaper trade, confirmed reporters think confirmed editors are mediocrities who took the easy way out. These attitudes mark an excess of vanity coupled with a lack of imagination; it never occurs to a writer that anybody could have wanted to be anything else.

journalism, writing

Cynicism is often the shamefaced product of inexperience.

cynicism, inexperience, shame, shamefaced

Khrushchev, too, looks like the kind of man his physicians must continually try to diet, and historians will some day correlate these sporadic deprivations, to which he submits “for his own good,” with his public tantrums. If there is to be a world cataclysm, it will probably be set off by skim milk, Melba toast, and mineral oil on the salad.

journalism, politics

Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one.

censorship, constitution, freedom-of-expression, opinion, press, speech, writing

Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one.

censorship, constitution, freedom-of-expression, opinion, press, speech, writing