30 Quotes by John Leonard

It takes a long time to grow an old friend.

Baseball happens to be a game of cumulative tension but football, basketball and hockey are played with hand grenades and machine guns.

In the cellars of the night, when the mind starts moving around old trunks of bad times, the pain of this and the shame of that, the memory of a small boldness is a hand to hold.

Isn't post-modernism really one big cover-up for the failure of the French to write a truly interesting novel ever since a sports car ate Albert Camus?

To be capable of embarrassment is the beginning of moral consciousness. Honor grows from qualms.

It seems to me that my whole life I've been standing on some tower or a pillbox or a trampoline, waving the names of writers, as if we needed rescue. And the first person I had to rescue was myself.

Isn't it amazing the way the future succeeds in creating an appropriate past?

Books fall from Garry Wills like leaves from a maple tree in a sort of permanent October.

Aspiring to a souffle, he achieves a pancake at which the reader saws without much appetite.