Top 40 Jimmy Breslin Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Don’t trust a brilliant idea unless it survives the hangover.”

— Jimmy Breslin

2. “Baseball isn’t statistics, it’s Joe DiMaggio rounding second base.”

— Jimmy Breslin

3. “Media, the plural of mediocrity.”

— Jimmy Breslin

Featured in: Fun Quotes

4. “Anything that isn’t writing is easy.”

— Jimmy Breslin

5. “Don’t call me a journalist; I hate the word. It’s pretentious!”

— Jimmy Breslin

6. “Speaks cheerful English and in the past has written this language with a paintbrush that talks.”

— Jimmy Breslin

7. “Designed by architects with honorable intentions but hands of palsy.”

— Jimmy Breslin

8. “When you leave New York you ain’t going anywhere.”

— Jimmy Breslin

9. “The number one rule of thieves is that nothing is too small to steal.”

— Jimmy Breslin

10. “When you stop drinking, you have to deal with this marvelous personality that started you drinking in the first place.”

— Jimmy Breslin

11. “Politics: where fat, bald, disagreeable men, unable to be candidates themselves, teach a president how to act on a public stage.”

— Jimmy Breslin

12. “So the Mets are a bad ball club. All right, they’re the worst ball club you ever saw. So what? The important thing is they are in the National League and they are familiar.”

— Jimmy Breslin

13. “The professional arsonist builds vacant lots for money.”

— Jimmy Breslin

14. “The office of president is a bastardized thing, half royalty and half democracy that nobody knows whether to genuflect or spit.”

— Jimmy Breslin

15. “Newspapers are so boring. How can you read a newspaper that starts with a 51-word lead sentence?”

— Jimmy Breslin

16. “People born in Queens, raised to say that each morning they get on the subway and “go to the city,” have a resentment of Manhattan, of the swiftness of its life and success of the people who live there.”

— Jimmy Breslin

17. “Complainant received immediate lacerations of the credibility.”

— Jimmy Breslin

18. “I’m on my high school football team and MUST show how much I know.”

— Jimmy Breslin

19. “Out in the ocean, a rope is put around the man’s neck. The other end of the rope is attached to an old jukebox and it is thrown overboard. The man invariably follows.”

— Jimmy Breslin

20. “I intended to concentrate throughout the summer on matters of extreme urgency: ocean waves breaking in the sunlight and swirls inside oyster shells and the mystery of the sound of ice hitting the sides of a glass. In the afternoon, the ice makes only this gentle, clicking, almost tinkling sound. Yet at night it sounds like gravel being poured into a barrel. Why is ice louder at night than it is in the daytime? Let me put on my shoes and we’ll go out and investigate.”

— Jimmy Breslin

21. “What you want to do is not go to work. You’re not missing a thing. The worst thing I did was start work young.”

— Jimmy Breslin

22. “True New Yorkers do not really seek information about the outside world. They feel that if anything is not in New York it is not likely to be interesting.”

— Jimmy Breslin

23. “The first funeral for Andrew Goodman was at night and it was a lot of work. To begin with they had to kill him.”

— Jimmy Breslin

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

24. “A job on a newspaper is a special thing. Every day you take something that you found out about, and you put it down and in a matter of hours it becomes a product. Not just a product like a can or something. It is a personal product that people, a lot of people, take the time to sit down and read.”

— Jimmy Breslin

25. “Football is a game designed to keep coal miners off the streets.”

— Jimmy Breslin

26. “The test of a good idea is its ability to last through a hangover.”

— Jimmy Breslin

27. “Men in the uniform of Wall Street retirement: black Chesterfield coat, rimless glasses and the Times folded to the obituary page...”

— Jimmy Breslin

28. “That’s the horrible thing starting out, you get distracted a lot because anything is easier than writing. It’s just the same enemy – blank paper.”

— Jimmy Breslin

29. “Marvelous Marv was holding down first base. This is like saying Willie Sutton works at your bank.”

— Jimmy Breslin

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

30. “The auditorium, named after a dead Queens politician is windowless in honor of the secrecy in which he lived and, probably, the bank vaults he frequented.”

— Jimmy Breslin

31. “I became a copy boy. Not for long. I started writing stories.”

— Jimmy Breslin

32. “Those of Manhattan are the brokers on Wall Street and they talk of people who went to the same colleges; those from Queens are margin clerks in the back offices and they speak of friends who live in the same neighborhood.”

— Jimmy Breslin

33. “If you gather a lot of stuff, then you write it, write in scenes with dialogue. Somewhere in the middle, rising from all this research like strong metal towers, is your opinions.”

— Jimmy Breslin

Featured in: Strong Quotes

34. “Shoelaces are the first way society ties up the individual.”

— Jimmy Breslin

35. “Precious was one of a large number of people on the street, many of whom appeared to be women; some, like Precious, actually were.”

— Jimmy Breslin

36. “Why something in the public interest such as television news can be fought over, like a chain of hamburger stands, eludes me.”

— Jimmy Breslin

37. “Life never was long enough to provide time for enemies. Nor is it long enough for people who bore me, or for me to stand around boring and antagonizing others, or for all of us, the others and me, to get into these half-friendly, half-sour fender-bumpings of egos and personalities and ideas, a process which turns a day into a contest when it really should be a series of hours serving your pleasure.”

— Jimmy Breslin

38. “The other feature is a gymnasium named after another dead politician who was gifted with fast and extremely sure hands.”

— Jimmy Breslin

39. “I busted out of the place in a hurry and went to a saloon and drank beer and said that for the rest of my life I’d never take a job in a place where you couldn’t throw cigarette butts on the floor. I was hooked on this writing for newspapers and magazines.”

— Jimmy Breslin

40. “As nearly all great fortunes in America are made on land stolen while the public’s back is turned – and by people who want money but don’t want to work for it, by men who use the title of builder and yet never have driven a nail into a board – nowhere was the relationship between politician and merchant closer than at the time the subways of New York were built.”

— Jimmy Breslin