Quote

After two years studying what rewrite men did with the facts I phoned them, I knew that journalism was essentially a task of stringing together seamlessly an endless series of cliches.

Russell Baker

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Russell Baker
Age: 93 †
Born: 1925
Born: August 14
Died: 2019
Died: January 21
Autobiographer
Journalist
Writer
Morrisonville
Virginia
Russell Wayne Baker
Facts
Journalism
Two
Newspapers
Phoned
Together
Task
Stringing
Years
Endless
Cliches
Men
Tasks
Rewrite
Series
Cliche
Study
Studying
Knew
Essentially

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I frankly admit to not knowing who I am. This is why I refuse to buy clothes that will tell people who I want them to think I am.
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You can't enjoy light verse with a heavy heart.
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The twentieth century seems afflicted by a gigantic... power failure. Powerlessness and the sense of powerlessness may be the environmental disease of the age.
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It takes great self-confidence to write a newspaper column. Some might say it takes arrogance. Be that as it may, my willingness to pronounce on a great many matters of which I have little or no knowledge is one of my prime qualifications for this trade.
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Kingsley Amis was one of a trio of brilliant comic novelists who made English literature sparkle in the twentieth century.
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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.
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It was Queen Elizabeth who made me a foreign correspondent.
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Happiness is a small and unworthy goal for something as big and fancy as a whole lifetime, and should be taken in small doses.
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Caution: These verses may be hazardous to your solemnity.
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Children rarely want to know who their parents were before they were parents, and when age finally stirs their curiosity, there is no parent left to tell them.
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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.
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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.
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Reality is the only obstacle to happiness.
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Windows 95 is what Rube Goldberg would have designed if he'd studied cartooning at M.I.T.
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What [man landing on the moon] is doing up there is indulging his obsession with the impossible. The impossible infuriates and tantalizes him. Show him an impossible job and he will reduce it to a possibility so trite that eventually it bores him.
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Humans treat time as a map and always know where they are located on it and respond with the appropriate emotion.
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What sweeter words can fall on the human ear? It's going to be May all week long.
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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.
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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.
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People seem to enjoy things more when they know a lot of other people have been left out of the pleasure.
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