Be Your Own Dick Allen

Dick Allen — smoker, All-Star, activist, eternal bon vivant. If you’re reading (or writing) these electronic pages, you either secretly wish that you were Dick Allen, or you publicly wish that you were Dick Allen. Well. Good news for all of us: this summer, NotGraphs Press will release its first publication, Be Your Own Dick Allen, designed to help even the most Cistullian among us to access our inner Dicks.

Inside the above very handsome volume, readers will find fashion advice, hot takes on tobacco products, a sleeve of pine-tar paper, best practices for loins-bearing and all-star hitting, and inspirational quotes designed to help you achieve maximum Dick Allen-ness in everyday life, just to name a few treats.

To whet your appetites for this groundbreaking publication — as if your appetites for things Dick Allen were in need of whetting — we share below a few of those quotes from the aura (if not from the actual mouth) of Dick Allen himself.

“We must balance conspicuous consumption with big ass home runs, baby.”

“I attribute my success to this: I never took any advice.”

“Definiteness of purpose is the starting point of all achievement. Well, I like to smoke a cigarette first — helps me to define my purpose later on.”

“Every child is an athlete. The problem is how to get a child to look cool without smoking a cigarette.”

“You can’t use up Dick Allen. The more you use, the more there is.”

“When everything seems to be going against you, maybe it’s because you haven’t been having that balanced breakfast of NutRolls, Cognac, and Kools.”

“It doesn’t matter how slowly you go as long as you don’t stop — or at least that’s what the ladies tell me.”

“Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the number of drags we can get in between at-bats.”

“There is only one way to avoid criticism: do nothing, say nothing, and do not enjoy rich, delicious Kool-brand cigarettes in the dugouts of the world.”