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

- Red Smith

Any sportswriter who thinks the world is no bigger than the outfield fence in not only a bad citizen, but also a lousy sportswriter.

- Red Smith

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 patin…

- Red Smith

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

- Red Smith

I think it's the real world. The people we're writing about in professional sports, they're suffering and living and dying and loving and trying to m…

- Red Smith

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…

- Red Smith

My best girl is dead.

- Red Smith

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.

- Red Smith

It is well known that the older a man grows, the faster he could run as a boy.

- Red Smith