85 Quotes by Alistair Cooke

As always, the British especially shudder at the latest American vulgarity, and then they embrace it with enthusiasm two years later.

It’s the rich what gets the pleasure, it’s the poor what gets the blame.’ I.

Every sport pretends to a literature, but people don’t believe it of any other sport but their own.

These doomsday warriors look no more like soldiers than the soldiers of the Second World War looked like conquistadors. The more expert they become the more they look like lab assistants in small colleges.

I talk to my typewriter and that is what I’ve been working on for 40 years-how to write for talking.

But afterall it’s not the winning that matters, is it? Or is it? It’sto coinawordtheamenitiesthatcount: thesmell of the dandelions, the puff of the pipe, the click of the bat, the rain on the neck, the chill down the spine, the slow, exquisite coming on of sunset and dinner and rheumatism.

To the goggling unbeliever Texans say, as people always say about their mangier dishes, ‘But it’s just like chicken, only tenderer.’ Rattlesnake is, in fact, just like chicken – only tougher.

Washington’s birthday is as close to a secular Christmas as any Christian country dare come this side of blasphemy.

There is even – as with no other game – a fascinating detective literature, a wry commentary on the human comedy, implicit in the book of rules.