Just Enough Liebling Quotes

“The sight of a pretty woman had an airborne chemical effect, like nerve gas. It relaxed the rubber band around his wallet.”
― A.J. Liebling, Just Enough Liebling: Classic Work by the Legendary New Yorker Writer

“It is hard for a writer to call an editor great, because it is natural for him to think of the editor as a writer manqué. It is like asking a thief to approve a fence, or a fighter to speak highly of a manager. “Fighters are sincere,” a fellow with the old pug’s syndrome said to me at a bar once as head wobbled and the hand that held his shot glass shook. “Managers are pimps, they sell our blood.” In the newspaper trade, confirmed reporters think confirmed editors are mediocrities who took the easy way out. These attitudes mark an excess of vanity coupled with a lack of imagination; it never occurs to a writer that anybody could have wanted to be anything else.”
― A.J. Liebling, Just Enough Liebling

“Up there in my retreat, I feel the city calling to me. It winks at me with its myriad eyes, and I go out and get stiff as a board. I seek out companionship, and if I do not find friends, I make them. A wonderful, grand old Babylon.”
― A.J. Liebling, Just Enough Liebling: Classic Work by the Legendary New Yorker Writer

“What an epithet can be derived from that—“Frivolous philologist!” For thirty years I have been waiting for a chance to use it, but every time I get into an argument with a savant, he turns out to be of some other persuasion—a psychologist, perhaps, or a podiatrist. The neck my knife would fit has never presented itself.”
― A.J. Liebling, Just Enough Liebling: Classic Work by the Legendary New Yorker Writer

“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, Just Enough Liebling

“Politics is to the conversation of Louisiana what horse racing is to England’s. In London, anybody from the Queen to a dustman will talk horses; in Louisiana, anyone from a society woman to a bellhop will talk politics. Louisiana politics is of an intensity and complexity that are matched, in my experience, only in the republic of Lebanon.”
― A.J. Liebling, Just Enough Liebling