Quote of the Day: Red Smith on writing

Red Smith

I love a pithy quote, don’t you? It’s a good thing for an educated person to read books of quotations.

Winston Churchill said that.*

Last week I posted about novelist M.J. Hyland’s advice about revising and rewriting. Her piece, at The Guardian, had been built around quotes from successful authors.

That got me spelunking through collections of quotes by writers, and even though few of them are about sportswriting, I was struck by how many of them were relevant for sportswriters. So I thought it would be fun to post one a day, for the general betterment of our little society.

Here’s our inaugural quote of the day:

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.

—Red Smith

Red Smith is my favorite sportswriter of all time. He’s probably my favorite because I’ve only read him in retrospect. He was still writing when I was a teenager, but he wasn’t in my hometown paper, and in those days that meant I never heard of him.

I discovered him later, long after he died, through collections of his brilliant columns, mostly for the old New York Herald Tribune. So I never had to sit through any dogs he may have written, which may have given me an exaggerated view of his greatness.

Or maybe not. In his prime, which was in the 1940s and ’50s, he was often called “The Shakespeare of the Press box.”

* * *

* Actually, Churchill said an educated man, not an educated person, but I thought the exact quote would be distracting there. Some of the quotes to come will have the word “man” where an enlightened person would say “person” today, but we’ll live with that in the spirit of accuracy. (Go back.)

Photo: National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association