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There is a healthy American newspaper tradition of not taking yourself seriously It is the story you must take that way... And if you do take yourself seriously, according to this sound convention, you are supposed to do your best not to let anyone else know about it. (Like bed-wetting.)

A. J. Liebling

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A. J. Liebling
Age: 59 †
Born: 1904
Born: October 18
Died: 1963
Died: December 28
Journalist
War Correspondent
New York City
New York
AJ Liebling
A.J. Liebling
A.J Liebling
A J Liebling
Abbott Joseph Liebling
Best
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Take
Taking
Conventions
Must
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More quotes by A. J. Liebling

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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
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The only way to write is well and how you do it is your own damn business.
A. J. Liebling
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Forget that New Orleans is actually a little like the Combat Zone with French cooking, it still happens to be part of the great state of Louisiana where people play the political game the same way it's played in Lebanon. The place is one layer after another of tribes, factions and at least a million laughs.
A. J. Liebling
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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
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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
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Cynicism is often the shamefaced product of inexperience.
A. J. Liebling
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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
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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
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The primary requisite for writing well about food is a good appetite.
A. J. Liebling
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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
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There is no concept more generally cherished by publishers than that of the Undeserving Poor.
A. J. Liebling
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I can write better than anyone who can write faster.
A. J. Liebling
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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