Top 35 A. J. Liebling Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better.”

— A. J. Liebling

2. “People everywhere confuse what they read in newspapers with news.”

— A. J. Liebling

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

— A. J. Liebling

4. “No ascetic can be considered reliably sane.”

— A. J. Liebling

5. “Cynicism is often the shamefaced product of inexperience.”

— A. J. Liebling

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

— A. J. Liebling

7. “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

8. “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

9. “If you just try long enough and hard enough, you can always manage to boot yourself in the posterior.”

— A. J. Liebling

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

— A. J. Liebling

11. “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.”

— A. J. Liebling

12. “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.”

— A. J. Liebling

13. “Chicago seems a big city instead of merely a large place.”

— A. J. Liebling

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

— A. J. Liebling

15. “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

16. “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

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

— A. J. Liebling

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

— A. J. Liebling

19. “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.”

— A. J. Liebling

20. “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

21. “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.”

— A. J. Liebling

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

— A. J. Liebling

23. “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.”

— A. J. Liebling

24. “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

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

— A. J. Liebling

26. “I can write faster than anyone who can write better, and I can write better than anyone who can write faster.”

— A. J. Liebling

27. “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. J. Liebling

28. “Up there in my retreat, I feel the city calling to me. It winks at me with its myriad eyes, and I go out and get stiff as a board. I seek out companionship, and if I do not find friends, I make them. A wonderful, grand old Babylon.”

— A. J. Liebling

29. “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.”

— A. J. Liebling

30. “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

31. “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.”

— A. J. Liebling

32. “The sight of a pretty woman had an airborne chemical effect, like nerve gas. It relaxed the rubber band around his wallet.”

— A. J. Liebling

33. “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.”

— A. J. Liebling

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

— A. J. Liebling

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

— A. J. Liebling

36. “What an epithet can be derived from that – “Frivolous philologist!” For thirty years I have been waiting for a chance to use it, but every time I get into an argument with a savant, he turns out to be of some other persuasion – a psychologist, perhaps, or a podiatrist. The neck my knife would fit has never presented itself.”

— A. J. Liebling

37. “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.”

— A. J. Liebling

38. “Moreover, these town toasts ate magnificently, and boasted of the quality of the meals their admirers provided for them. It was the age not only of the dazzling public supper but of the cabinet particulier, where even a bourgeois seduction was preceded by an eleven-course meal. With these altruistic sensualists, a menu of superior imagination could prove more effective than a gift of Suez shares; besides, the ladies’ hosts.”

— A. J. Liebling