Red Smith Quotes

• Writing is easy. Just sit in front of a typewriter, open up a vein and bleed it out drop by drop.

  Red Smith

  Art, Writing, Typewriters

  49 Copy quote

• Ninety feet between home plate and first base may be the closest man has ever come to perfection.

  Red Smith

  Sports, Baseball, Home

  59 Copy quote

• Baseball is a dull game only for those with dull minds.

  Red Smith

  Baseball, Games, Mind

  18 Copy quote

• Dying is no big deal. Living is the trick.

  Red Smith

  Dying, Bigs, Tricks

  19 Copy quote

• It is well known that the older a man grows, the faster he could run as a boy.

  Red Smith

  Running, Boys, Men

  21 Copy quote

• Today's game is always different from yesterday's game.

  Red Smith

  Games, Yesterday, Different

  Red Smith (1983). “The Red Smith reader”, Vintage

  19 Copy quote

• I think it's the real world. The people we're writing about in professional sports, they're suffering and living and dying and loving and trying to make their way through life just as the brick layers and politicians are.

  Red Smith

  Sports, Real, Writing

  19 Copy quote

• I have known writers who paid no damned attention whatever to the rules of grammar and rhetoric and somehow made the language behave for them.

  Red Smith

  Attention, Language, Made

  20 Copy quote

• Now it is done. Now the story ends. And there is no way to tell it. The art of fiction is dead. Reality has strangled invention.

  Red Smith

  Art, Reality, Fiction

  Red Smith (2013). “American Pastimes: The Very Best of Red Smith (The Library of America)”, p.26, Library of America

  20 Copy quote

• Unlike the normal pattern, I know I have grown more liberal as I've grown older. I have become more convinced that there is room for improvement in the world.

  Red Smith

  World, Patterns, Rooms

  Red Smith (1983). “The Red Smith reader”, Vintage

  18 Copy quote

• Writing is very much like bricklaying. You learn to put one brick on top of another and spread the mortar so thick.

  Red Smith

  Writing, Bricks, Bricklaying

  16 Copy quote

• Any sportswriter who thinks the world is no bigger than the outfield fence in not only a bad citizen, but also a lousy sportswriter.

  Red Smith

  Thinking, Citizens, World

  12 Copy quote

• It was an ideal day for football - too cold for the spectators and too cold for the players.

  Red Smith

  Football, Player, Cold

  20 Copy quote

• In my later years I have sought to become simpler, straighter and purer in my handling of the language. I've had many writing heroes, writers who have influenced me. Of the ones still alive, I can think of E.B. White. I certainly admire the pure, crystal stream of his prose. When I was very young as a sportswriter I knowingly and unashamedly imitated others. I had a series of heroes who would delight me for a while and I'd imitate them--Damon Runyon, Westbrook Pegler, Joe Williams.

  Red Smith

  Sports, Hero, Writing

  14 Copy quote

• Ninety feet between the bases is the nearest thing to perfection that man has yet achieved.

  Red Smith

  Men, Feet, Perfection

  10 Copy quote

• For 350 years we have been taught that reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man and writing an exact man. Football's place is to add a patina of character, a deference to the rules and a respect for authority.

  Red Smith

  Sports, Football, Reading

  14 Copy quote

• The Russians have a weapon that can wipe out two hundred eighty thousand Americans. That puts them exactly ten years behind Howard Cosell.

  Red Smith

  Sports, Years, Two

  11 Copy quote

• Young men have visions, old men have dreams.

  Red Smith

  Dream, Men, Vision

  Red Smith (2013). “American Pastimes: The Very Best of Red Smith (The Library of America)”, p.325, Library of America

  12 Copy quote

• I like to get where the cabbage is cooking and catch the scents.

  Red Smith

  Cooking, Scent, Cabbage

  16 Copy quote

• In entertainment value, the Democratic clambake usually lays it over the Republican conclave like ice cream over parsnips.

  Red Smith

  Ice Cream, Politics, Entertainment

  12 Copy quote

• It's no accident that of all the monuments left of the Greco- Roman culture the biggest is the ballpark, the Colosseum, the YankeeStadium of ancient times.

  Red Smith

  Sports, Baseball, Culture

  7 Copy quote

• The natural habitat of the tongue is the left cheek.

  Red Smith

  Habitat, Tongue, Natural

  12 Copy quote

• My best girl is dead.

  Red Smith

  Girl

  11 Copy quote

• As a ballplayer, (Dizzy) Dean was a natural phenomenon, like the Grand Canyon or the Great Barrier Reef. Nobody ever taught him baseball and he never had to learn. He was just doing what came naturally when a scout named Don Curtis discovered him on a Texas sandlot and gave him his first contract.

  Red Smith

  Baseball, Texas, Firsts

  20 Copy quote

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