Quotes by Alistair Cooke

The best thing about Eisenhower’s Presidency was his Jeffersonian conviction that there should be as little government and as much golf as possible.

It’s an acting job – acting natural.

It has always been cited as an irrepressible symptom of America’s vitality that her people, in fair times and foul, believe in themselves and their institutions.

Authors are now marketed like promising movie starlets and must rattle around the nation’s television stations to try to assert a salable identity different from that of the other starlets.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.