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.

It was Queen Elizabeth who made me a foreign correspondent.

Live by publicity, you'll probably die by publicity.

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.

Happiness is a small and unworthy goal for something as big and fancy as a whole lifetime, and should be taken in small doses.

A man doesn't amount to something because he has been successful at a third-rate career like journalism. It is evidence, that's all: evidence that if he buckled down and worked hard, he might some day do something really worth doing.

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.