Quotes about Journalism

Not to be weirdly glib, but as a reporter, you should be honest all the time.

Myth is much more important and true than history. History is just journalism and you know how reliable that is.

I started working for the 'NY Observer' when I was 33. After I had been writing for them for about a year and a half the editor said, 'Your stories are the most talked about stories in the 'Observer'; you should have your own column.'

When I was trained as a journalist, as a race-relations reporter in Nashville covering the end of the civil-rights movement, we were strictly forbidden to use the first-person pronoun. There was kind of an electric charge around it. To come out from hiding and use the word 'I' carried a lot of fright for me.

He [Walter Cronkite] was also a profoundly good man. I don't think we should lose sight of that. All those professional gifts emanated from a very good core and that's something that's beyond training. It's who he was.

Newspapers are the second hand of history. This hand, however, is usually not only of inferior metal to the other hands, it also seldom works properly.

Many fiction writers write for the critics or for themselves; they forget the common reader. I never do. I don't think journalism clashes with my fiction; on the contrary, it helps enormously.

I have written periodically for the Guardian for more than a decade.

Suspense in news is torture.

Journalists are like dogs?when ever anything moves they begin to bark.

He saw the article...which was not an expression of ideas, but a bucket of slime emptied in public—an article that did not contain a single fact, not even an invented one, but poured a stream of sneers and adjectives in which nothing was clear except the filthy malice of denouncing without considering proof necessary.

I shall always be proud of what I've done, regardless of what you journalists or anybody can say.