Russell Baker
Russell Baker
Russell Wayne Bakeris an American writer known for his satirical commentary and self-critical prose, as well as for his Pulitzer Prize-winning autobiography Growing Up. He was a columnist for The New York Times from 1962 to 1998, and also hosted the PBS show Masterpiece Theatre from 1992 to 2004...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionMemoirist
Date of Birth14 August 1925
CityMorrisonville, VA
CountryUnited States of America
queens queen-elizabeth made
It was Queen Elizabeth who made me a foreign correspondent.
pieces rhetoric glorious
Roosevelt's declaration that Americans had 'nothing to fear but fear itself' was a glorious piece of inspirational rhetoric and just as gloriously wrong.
war thinking opposites
Strategic thinkers were naturally rattled to find this outsider fooling around with their work. They had been thinking strategically when Reagan was just another movie actor playing opposite a chimpanzee, for heaven's sake. They think Reagan is too naive, too innocent, to grasp the intellectual complexities of cold war strategy.
school yale ivy
Voters inclined to loathe and fear elite Ivy League schools rarely make fine distinctions between Yale and Harvard. All they know is that both are full of rich, fancy, stuck-up and possibly dangerous intellectuals who never sit down to supper in their undershirt no matter how hot the weather gets.
too-much problem enough
The biographer's problem is that he never knows enough. The autobiographer's problem is that he knows too much.
christian smell hypocrisy
One of the many burdens of the person professing Christianity has always been the odium likely to be heaped upon him by fellow Christians quick to smell out, denounce and punish fraud, hypocrisy and general unworthiness among those who assert the faith. In ruder days, disputes about what constituted a fully qualified Christian often led to sordid quarrels in which the disputants tortured, burned and hanged each other in the conviction that torture, burning and hanging were Christian things to do…
thinking vegetables cities
The people who say: 'You are what you eat' have always seemed addled to me. In my opinion, you are what you think, and if you don't think, you can eat all the meat in Kansas City and still be nothing but a vegetable.
point-break problem british
Ireland really is my problem; the breaking point of the huge suppuration which all British and all European society now is
writing play roles
In writing, punctuation plays the role of body language. It helps readers hear you the way you want to be heard.
smile opportunity feel-good
You can always tell folks from nonfolks. Folks like to feel good, like to smile for the camera when there's a big photo opportunity for a really good cause.
classic determined synonym
Schoolteachers seemed determined to persuade me that 'classic' is a synonym for 'narcotic'.
jobs moon men
What [man landing on the moon] is doing up there is indulging his obsession with the impossible. The impossible infuriates and tantalizes him. Show him an impossible job and he will reduce it to a possibility so trite that eventually it bores him.
laughter years records
Situation comedy on television has thrived for years on 'canned' laughter, grafted by gaglines by technicians using records of guffawing audiences that have been dead for years.
pain father real
After that [father's death] I never cried with any real conviction, nor expected much of anyone's God except indifference, nor loved deeply without fear that it would cost me dearly in pain. At the age of five I had become a skeptic and began to sense that any happiness that came my way might be the prelude to some grim cosmic joke.