A professional is someone who can do his best work when he doesn't feel like it.
– Alistair Cooke
Between a quarter and a third of Los Angeles's land area is now monopolized by the automobile and its needs-by freeways, highways, garages, gas stations, car lots, parking lots. And all of it is blanketed with anonymity and foul air.
– Alistair Cooke
Canned music is like audible wallpaper.
– Alistair Cooke
Cocktail music is accepted as audible wallpaper.
– Alistair Cooke
Curiosity endows the people who have it with a generosity in argument and a serenity in their own mode of life which springs from their cheerful willingness to let life take the form it will.
– Alistair Cooke
Golf is an open exhibition of overweening ambition, courage deflated by stupidity, skill soured by a whiff of arrogance.
– Alistair Cooke
Hollywood grew to be the most flourishing factory of popular mythology since the Greeks.
– Alistair Cooke
I talk to my typewriter and that is what I've been working on for 40 years-how to write for talking.
– Alistair Cooke
It has been an unchallengeable American doctrine that cranberry sauce, a pink goo with overtones of sugared tomatoes, is a delectable necessity of the Thanksgiving board and that turkey is uneatable without it.
– Alistair Cooke
It's an acting job - acting natural.
– Alistair Cooke
Las Vegas is Everyman's cut-rate Babylon. Not far away there is, or was, a roadside lunch counter and over it a sign proclaiming in three words that a Roman emperor's orgy is now a democratic institution. Topless Pizza Lunch.
– Alistair Cooke
Man has an incurable habit of not fulfilling the prophecies of his fellow men.
– Alistair Cooke
People in America, when listening to radio, like to lean forward. People in Britain like to lean back.
– Alistair Cooke
People, when they first come to America, whether as travelers or settlers, become aware of a new and agreeable feeling: that the whole country is their oyster.
– Alistair Cooke
Texas does not, like any other region, simply have indigenous dishes. It proclaims them. It congratulates you, on your arrival, at having escaped from the slop pails of the other 49 states.
– Alistair Cooke
The best compliment to a child or a friend is the feeling you give him that he has been set free to make his own inquiries, to come to conclusions that are right for him, whether or not they coincide with your own.
– Alistair Cooke
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.
– Alistair Cooke
These humiliations are the essence of the game.
– Alistair Cooke
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.
– Alistair Cooke
Washington's birthday is as close to a secular Christmas as any Christian country dare come this side of blasphemy.
– Alistair Cooke
When television came roaring in after the war (World War II) they did a little school survey asking children which they preferred and why - television or radio. And there was this 7-year-old boy who said he preferred radio because the pictures were better.
– Alistair Cooke
Who is this rare bird, perched at the eerie dead center of the world's hurricane, whom all men delight to praise? A Machiavelli with a Boy Scout's exterior? A gross flatterer? A Talleyrand subtler than Khrishna Menon? A monstrous appeaser? Clean is the word for Hammarskjold.