Jimmy Breslin > Quotes

“When you stop drinking, you have to deal with this marvelous personality that started you drinking in the first place.”
― Jimmy Breslin

“When you leave New York you ain't going anywhere.”
― Jimmy Breslin

“True New Yorkers do not really seek information about the outside world. They feel that if anything is not in New York it is not likely to be interesting.”
― Jimmy Breslin

“Reporting is all about legwork, getting out and finding the story. But all the stories are on the top floors, so you have to learn to climb stairs. That's what reporting is all about, climbing tenement stairs.”
― Jimmy Breslin

“Life never was long enough to provide time for enemies. Nor is it long enough for people who bore me, or for me to stand around boring and antagonizing others, or for all of us, the others and me, to get into these half-friendly, half-sour fender-bumpings of egos and personalities and ideas, a process which turns a day into a contest when it really should be a series of hours serving your pleasure.”
― Jimmy Breslin

“Shoelaces are the first way society ties up the individual.”
― Jimmy Breslin

“You see, the Mets are losers, just like nearly everybody else in life. This is a team for the cab driver who gets held up and the guy who loses out on a promotion because he didn't maneuver himself to lunch with the boss enough. It is the team for every guy who has to get out of bed in the morning and go to work for short money on a job he does not like. And it is the team for every woman who looks up ten years later and sees her husband eating dinner in a t-shirt and wonders how the hell she ever let this guy talk her into getting married. The Yankees? Who does well enough to root for them, Laurence Rockefeller?”
― Jimmy Breslin, Can't Anybody Here Play This Game?: The Improbable Saga of the New York Mets' First Year

“So the Mets are a bad ball club. All right, they're the worst ball club you ever saw. So what? The important thing is they are in the National League and they are familiar.”
― Jimmy Breslin, Can't Anybody Here Play This Game?: The Improbable Saga of the New York Mets' First Year

“Pointing to the mutual envy of businessmen and politicians who are often out of their field in each other's area,, the author quotes the wisdom, "A wise shoemaker sticks to his trade and maintains a mouthful of nails.”
― Jimmy Breslin, Branch Rickey

“The Mets lose an awful lot?

Listen, mister. Think a little bit.

When was the last time you won anything out of life?”
― Jimmy Breslin

“I'm on my high school football team and MUST show how much I know.”
― Jimmy Breslin

“I intended to concentrate throughout the summer on matters of extreme urgency: ocean waves breaking in the sunlight and swirls inside oyster shells and the mystery of the sound of ice hitting the sides of a glass. In the afternoon, the ice makes only this gentle, clicking, almost tinkling sound. Yet at night it sounds like gravel being poured into a barrel. Why is ice louder at night than it is in the daytime? Let me put on my shoes and we'll go out and investigate.”
― Jimmy Breslin

“woman came to the checkout counter. She took a small order out of the shopping cart and placed it on the conveyor. There was bread, chopped meat, dishwashing liquid, a”
― Jimmy Breslin, The World According to Breslin

“In his time, Hornsby was an unbelievable hitter who three times finished with an average of over .400, reaching .424 in 1924, a record still standing. This background has not made him exactly tolerant of the ability of baseball players. To illustrate, we reprint herewith the most glowing report on an individual which Hornsby handed in all season: LOOKS LIKE A MAJOR-LEAGUE PLAYER The name at the top of the sheet said the report was about Mickey Mantle.”
― Jimmy Breslin, Can't Anybody Here Play This Game?: The Improbable Saga of the New York Mets' First Year

“As nearly all great fortunes in America are made on land stolen while the public's back is turned — and by people who want money but don't want to work for it, by men who use the title of builder and yet never have driven a nail into a board — nowhere was the relationship between politician and merchant closer than at the time the subways of New York were built.”
― Jimmy Breslin, Damon Runyon

“They lost an awful lot of games by one run, which is the mark of a bad team. They also lost innumerable games by fourteen runs or so. This is the mark of a terrible team.”
― Jimmy Breslin, Can't Anybody Here Play This Game?: The Improbable Saga of the New York Mets' First Year

“All the men in baseball understood the code,” Barber recalled later. “A code is harder to break than an actual law. A law is impersonal. Often a man breaks a law, is clever enough to get away with it, and people think he is a smart fellow. But when you break an unwritten law, a code of conduct, you are damned, castigated, banished from the club so to speak. You are a renegade, a scoundrel, an ingrate, a pariah.”
― Jimmy Breslin, Branch Rickey: A Life

“I’ve been a Mets fan all my life.” Nearly everybody was saying it by mid-June. And nearly everybody had a good reason for saying it. You see, the Mets are losers, just like nearly everybody else in life.”
― Jimmy Breslin, Can't Anybody Here Play This Game?: The Improbable Saga of the New York Mets' First Year

“The bartender put a couple of fistfuls of ice chunks into a big, thick mixing glass and then proceeded to make a Tom Collins that had so much gin in it that the other people at the bar started to laugh. He served the drink to the Babe just as it was made, right in the mixing glass. Ruth said something about how heavens to Betsy hot he was, and then he picked up the glass and opened his mouth, and there went everything. In one shot he swallowed the drink, the orange slice and the rest of the garbage, and the ice chunks too. He stopped for nothing. There is not a single man I have ever seen in a saloon who does not bring his teeth together a little bit and stop those ice chunks from going in. A man has to have a pipe the size of a trombone to take ice in one shot. But I saw Ruth do it, and whenever somebody tells me about how the Babe used to drink and eat when he was playing ball, I believe every word of it.”
― Jimmy Breslin, Can't Anybody Here Play This Game?: The Improbable Saga of the New York Mets' First Year

“It is the team for every guy who has to get out of bed in the morning and go to work for short money on a job he does not like. And it is the team for every woman who looks up ten years later and sees her husband eating dinner in a T-shirt and wonders how the hell she ever let this guy talk her into getting married. The Yankees? Who does well enough to root for them, Laurence Rockefeller?”
― Jimmy Breslin, Can't Anybody Here Play This Game?: The Improbable Saga of the New York Mets' First Year

“The Dodgers won it, 9-8, when Robinson hit a home run in the fourteenth inning. In the eleventh, he had knocked himself unconscious in a dive for a low line drive hit by Del Ennis. If he had not made the catch, the game would have been over. It was one of the matchless individual performances baseball has seen.”
― Jimmy Breslin, Can't Anybody Here Play This Game?: The Improbable Saga of the New York Mets' First Year

“Long Island is a sandspit 150 miles long. It originally was the great outwash plain of a glacier, and history shows even the Indians didn’t want much to do with it. They moved out without a fight and without asking for a dime when the whites arrived. Later the redcoat General Howe engaged Washington’s Colonials in something called the Battle of Long Island, and Howe succeeded in driving Washington off Long Island and up the Hudson to someplace like Dobbs Ferry. Anybody who knows anything about Dobbs Ferry as opposed to Long Island can never accept a history book which says this was a defeat for Washington. In fact, there are many people who still wonder why we did not insist that the English, as part of the Yorktown surrender, be forced to retain Long Island.”
― Jimmy Breslin, Can't Anybody Here Play This Game?: The Improbable Saga of the New York Mets' First Year

“LONG ISLAND, WHICH IS considered part of New York and the new home of the Mets, is the perfect place for them. Nothing particularly good has happened on Long Island for over fifty years, so nobody is going to get unduly concerned if the Mets take more than a little while to pull themselves together.”
― Jimmy Breslin, Can't Anybody Here Play This Game?: The Improbable Saga of the New York Mets' First Year

“You think of all these things as you stand and watch this big job. And then, just for a minute, everything changes. The ground, piled with dirt and covered with empty beer cans and crushed coffee containers, turns into cropped Merion blue. The turf surrounds an infield that doesn’t have a pebble on it. The bare steel beams turn into gleaming stands, and they are filled. You can hear the crowd making noise. And now it hits you. Now you realize, for the first time, what this is all about. All of it, all of the workers risking their lives, and all of the huge payrolls and all of the political wrangling. There is a reason for it all: They are building a brand-new stadium for Marvin Throneberry. Marvin Throneberry, who is known as Marvelous Marv to his admirers, plays first base for the New York Mets, the team which is going to play its home games in this new stadium. In fact, Marvelous Marv does more than just play first base for the Mets. He is the Mets.”
― Jimmy Breslin, Can't Anybody Here Play This Game?: The Improbable Saga of the New York Mets' First Year

“The mountain of money suckers pour into the lottery machines goes into the running of government, which means that the mayors and commissioners and councilmen take it.”
― Jimmy Breslin, The Good Rat

“Prejudice,” Rickey told the table. “It reflects an attitude of a great many people in this country who don’t introspect themselves very closely about their own prejudices. . . . You can’t meet it with words. You can’t take prejudice straight on. It must be done by proximity. Proximity! The player alongside you. No matter what the skin color or language. Win the game. Win all. Get the championship and the check that goes with it.”
― Jimmy Breslin, Branch Rickey: A Life

“I figured I would be able to rely on big-name historians whom I have yet to read and that this would be immensely pleasurable. And then I read the books. History writers should be put not in the jail but under it.”
― Jimmy Breslin, Branch Rickey: A Life

“For consistency, Philadelphia baseball, among other things in the town, always has been the worst.”
― Jimmy Breslin, Can't Anybody Here Play This Game?: The Improbable Saga of the New York Mets' First Year