It was Queen Elizabeth who made me a foreign correspondent.

Journalism was being whittled away by a Wall Street theory that profits can be maximized by minimizing the product.

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.

It is safest to shut up and pay, which is what I shall eventually do, though I shall hate having to sell the children.

Like all young reporters - brilliant or hopelessly incompetent - I dreamed of the glamorous life of the foreign correspondent: prowling Vienna in a Burberry trench coat, speaking a dozen languages to dangerous women, narrowly escaping Sardinian bandits - the usual stuff that newspaper dreams are made of.

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.

Americans like fat books and thin women.