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.

I worry about people who get born nowadays, because they get born into such tiny families--sometimes into no family at all. When you're the only pea in the pod, your parents are likely to get you confused with the Hope Diamond. And that encourages you to talk too much.

Life is always walking up to us and saying, "Come on in, the living's fine," and what do we do? Back off and take its picture.

Americans like fat books and thin women.

Voters inclined to loathe and fear elite Ivy League schools rarely make fine distinctions between Yale and Harvard. All they know is that both are full of rich, fancy, stuck-up and possibly dangerous intellectuals who never sit down to supper in their undershirt no matter how hot the weather gets.

Ireland really is my problem; the breaking point of the huge suppuration which all British and all European society now is

People seem to enjoy things more when they know a lot of other people have been left out of the pleasure.