Quote

The only thing I was fit for was to be a writer, and this notion rested solely on my suspicion that I would never be fit for real work, and that writing didn't require any.

Russell Baker

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Russell Baker
Age: 93 †
Born: 1925
Born: August 14
Died: 2019
Died: January 21
Autobiographer
Journalist
Writer
Morrisonville
Virginia
Russell Wayne Baker
Writing
Solely
Thing
Suspicion
Work
Require
Fit
Never
Notion
Would
Writer
Didn
Real
Rested

More quotes by Russell Baker

Image
Scientists have been struck by the fact that things that break down virtually never get lost, while things that get lost hardly ever break down.
Russell Baker
Image
Rereading A.J. Liebling carries me happily back to an age when all good journalists knew they had plenty to be modest about, and were.
Russell Baker
Image
Anticipating that most poetry will be worse than carrying heavy luggage through O'Hare Airport, the public, to its loss, reads very little of it.
Russell Baker
Image
New York is the only city in the world where you can get run down on the sidewalk by a pedestrian.
Russell Baker
Image
There are good reasons why everybody should heed politicians' advise not to believe the media. One of the best is that the media report what politicians say.
Russell Baker
Image
Humans treat time as a map and always know where they are located on it and respond with the appropriate emotion.
Russell Baker
Image
You can always tell folks from nonfolks. Folks like to feel good, like to smile for the camera when there's a big photo opportunity for a really good cause.
Russell Baker
Image
It was Queen Elizabeth who made me a foreign correspondent.
Russell Baker
Image
Inanimate objects can be classified scientifically into three major categories: those that don't work, those that break down and those that get lost.
Russell Baker
Image
So there he is at last. Man on the moon. The poor magnificent bungler! He can't even get to the office without undergoing the agonies of the damned, but give him a little metal, a few chemicals, some wire and twenty or thirty billion dollars and vroom! there he is, up on a rock a quarter of a million miles up in the sky.
Russell Baker
Image
It was clear soon after his election that Obama, like FDR, wanted to start dealing with the economic crisis immediately after his inauguration.
Russell Baker
Image
Life seemed to be an educator's practical joke in which you spent the first half learning and the second half learning that everything you learned in the first half was wrong.
Russell Baker
Image
A day spent praising the earth and lamenting man's pollutionist history makes you feel like a superior, sensitive soul.
Russell Baker
Image
There was scarcely a woman alive, it seemed, who could resist the urge to haul men down onto beds, car seats, kitchen floors, dining-room tables, park grass, parlor sofas, or packing crates, entwine warm thighs around them, and pant in ecstasy.
Russell Baker
Image
The best thing about being President is that it gets you out of American life. I don't know what the theory is behind this, but it is a fact. The first thing we do with a President is shunt him off to a siding where nothing American can ever happen to him.
Russell Baker
Image
Strategic thinkers were naturally rattled to find this outsider fooling around with their work. They had been thinking strategically when Reagan was just another movie actor playing opposite a chimpanzee, for heaven's sake. They think Reagan is too naive, too innocent, to grasp the intellectual complexities of cold war strategy.
Russell Baker
Image
The old notion that brevity is the essence of wit has succumbed to the modern idea that tedium is the essence of quality.
Russell Baker
Image
Gerald Boyd was a classic specimen of the self-made man. Born poor, he worked and studied his way up out of poverty under the guidance of his widowed grandmother.
Russell Baker
Image
What the New Yorker calls home would seem like a couple of closets to most Americans, yet he manages not only to live there but also to grow trees and cockroaches right on the premises.
Russell Baker
Image
Long words, fat talk they may tell us something about ourselves. Has the passion for fat in the language increased as self-confidence has waned?
Russell Baker