Red Smith Quotations

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

The natural habitat of the tongue is the left cheek.

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

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.

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

Young men have visions, old men have dreams.

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.

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.

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

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.