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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
Sound
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Else
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Stories
Tradition
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Cynicism is often the shamefaced product of inexperience.
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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
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Henry Miller may write about revelers self-woven into a human hooked rug, because his ecstasy is solemn.
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I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better.
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Newspapers write about other newspapers with circumspection, ... about themselves with awe, and only after mature reflection.
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There is no concept more generally cherished by publishers than that of the Undeserving Poor.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The only way to write is well and how you do it is your own damn business.
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If you just try long enough and hard enough, you can always manage to boot yourself in the posterior.
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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.
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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.
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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.'
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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.
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People everywhere confuse what they read in newspapers with news.
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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.
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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