Reporter Quotes

'Amazing Grace' is not a book of interviews or onetime snapshots. It's a memoir of a journey that took me into a place I had never been and took over two years of my life. I don't think the people in this book would have said the things to me that they did if they perceived me as a reporter. ~ Jonathan Kozol

True enough, nature has endowed me with a fair measure of patience and composure, yet I should be lying if I told you that, having seen the reporter off on his way to make his deadline, I fell peacefully asleep. ~ Leon Jouhaux

The year the police called Sherrena, Wisconsin saw more than one victim per week murdered by a current or former romantic partner or relative. 10 After the numbers were released, Milwaukee's chief of police appeared on the local news and puzzled over the fact that many victims had never contacted the police for help. A nightly news reporter summed up the chief's views: "He believes that if police were contacted more often, that victims would have the tools to prevent fatal situations from occurring in the future." What the chief failed to realize, or failed to reveal, was that his department's own rules presented battered women with a devil's bargain: keep quiet and face abuse or call the police and face eviction. ~ Matthew Desmond

As a reporter, going around, you hear stories you can't prove, which means you can't put them in the newspaper. But they're good stories, and I would jot them down thinking maybe one day I could write that as a short story. ~ Pete Hamill

Am I perfect? No. Do I want to be perfect? No, because if I were perfect, I would be a reporter. ~ Paul LePage

I don't like the word 'poetry,' and I don't like poetry readings, and I usually don't like poets. I would much prefer describing myself and what I do as: I'm kind of a curator, and I'm kind of a night-owl reporter. ~ Tom Waits

Tonight was awful. It was the combination of everything. Of the play "Goodbye My Fancy," of wanting, in a juvenile way, to be, like the heroine, a reporter in the trenches, to be loved by a man who admired me, who understood me as much as I understood myself. ~ Sylvia Plath

Ah well, to the journalist every country is rich. ~ Evelyn Waugh

Foreign correspondence has a natural element of romanticism - and this could be seen as soon as that class of professional reporter emerged in the last half of the 19th century. ~ John Maxwell Hamilton

Well I just always wanted to be a newspaper reporter. ~ H. G. Bissinger

An Associated Press report by Chicago-based reporter Sharon Cohen in May 1993 examined Christian fundamentalists and concluded that they were prone to 'riots, terrorism - and death.' ~ Ralph E. Reed, Jr.

She was halfway through the revolving door when the thought hit her; she was the one who had seen Junior and Luther fighting before the banquet. She was the one had told Detective Sullivan. Overcome with guilt, she grabbed Ted's arm and faced him.
"It's because of me," she said. "Junior was arrested because of me! ~ Leslie Meier

It was a wonderful combination for a reporter, the exterior so comforting, the interior so driven. ~ David Halberstam

I have this reporter's temperament still in me - I thrive under pressure. ~ David Lagercrantz

Freelance investigative reporter Danny Casolaro was looking into the Cabazon/Wackenhut projects as part of a larger conspiracy investigation at the time he was found dead in a West Virginia motel room in 1991, allegedly a suicide victim. He had told friends he was convinced that "spies, arms merchants and others were using the reservation as a low-profile site on which to develop weapons for Third World armies, including the Nicaraguan Contras. ~ Gary Webb

I don't think a reporter necessarily becomes an arm of law enforcement. I think a reporter is like any other citizen. If a citizen can do his or her duty as a witness, if they have information about a crime, or if they have information about a criminal group, I think that there's a duty on the part of the citizen. ~ Edwin Meese

Three things ruin a man," Harry would tell a reporter long afterward. "Power, money, and women. "I never wanted power," he said. "I never had any money, and the only woman in my life is up at the house right now." On ~ David McCullough

[I] settled down with the Daily News and the Post, glad to be back with journalism where all murders are "brutal," all prosecutors are "tough," and all blondes are
"attractive." And any lawyer who cooperates with the reporter is
"high-powered. ~ Andrew Vachss

I'm not much a TV reporter, as in someone who covers the daily machinations of the television industry, though I certainly follow it and weave it into my reviews and essays about the medium. ~ Hank Stuever

As a reporter you tend to seek coherence from your subject or your source - it all needs to add up and make sense. In truth, in reality, there's often a great deal of murkiness and muddiness, confusion and contradiction. ~ Amy Waldman

When the Lakota leader Sitting Bull was asked by a white reporter why his people loved and respected him, Sitting Bull replied by asking if it was not true that among white people a man is respected because he has many horses, many houses? When the reporter replied that was indeed true, Sitting Bull then said that his people respected him because he kept nothing for himself. ~ Joseph Bruchac

Walter Cronkite was a personally decent and convivial man, who literally couldn't kill a fly, was kind to his children, generally helpful to juniors, authentically curious about the news, and, in his time, an energetic reporter. ~ Conrad Black

For most of my adult life, I have been an emotional hit-and- run driver
that is, a reporter. I made people like me, trust me, open their hearts and their minds to me, and cry and bleed on to the pages of my neat little notebooks, and then I went back to a safe place and made a story out of it. ~ Anna Quindlen

[ ... ] with the protecting sky in all its splendour and the golden sun blazing forth against a backdrop of crystalline blue, to use the inspired words of a television reporter[ ... ]. ~ Jose Saramago

And as for returning to work as a reporter - something she'd given considerable thought to before taking over her father's inquiry agency - the Sydney newspapers had dismissed most of their women reporters home once the men started to return from the war, or else confined them to the social pages, or covering the Easter Show, which was a bit too steep a downgrade for Billie after she'd chased Nazi activity across Europe, built a good portfolio of published articles, and worked alongside the likes of Lee Miller and Clare Hollingworth.

No, she wouldn't last in that kind of work. It was an imperfect world, and her chosen profession was decidedly imperfect, but for now she had a hint of that spark again, that sense of doing something that mattered to someone. ~ Tara Moss

When Donald Trump says a distinguished judge born in Indiana can't do his job because of his Mexican heritage, or he mocks a reporter with disabilities, or calls women pigs, it goes against everything we stand for. ~ Hillary Clinton

...he told a story about the days when he was a reporter himself and how he had gotten so close to story that he finally couldn't write it...When I stared at something long enough, the lines blurred and I could no longer see it for what it was. One thing became another. ~ Pete Dexter

When my TV show, 'Sports Jobs with Junior Seau,' assigned me to be a 'Sports Illustrated' reporter for a weekend, I didn't realize I'd have to squeeze it in around another sports job. I had planned to retire from the NFL to enjoy the cushy lifestyle of a full-time reality TV star, but I wound up getting run over by a bull. ~ Junior Seau

The night before I began my career as a presidential campaign reporter, in September 2007, I finished Theodore White's 'The Making of the President,' the classic account of the 1960 race, which opened up a new era of campaign reporting. ~ Michael Hastings

The illustrator is essentially a reporter: his subjects come from the outside, lit by a flash. A subject comes to the classical artist from inside, and when he discovers confirmation of it in the outside world he feels that it has been there all the time. ~ Kenneth Clark

Writing for adults and writing for young people is really not that different. As a reporter, I have always tried to write as clearly and simply as possible. I like clean, unadorned writing. So writing for a younger audience was largely an exercise in making my prose even more clear and direct, and in avoiding complicated digressions. ~ Serge Schmemann

Having small children and being an investigative reporter would seem like a difficult mix, but it worked well for me. I was often working on my own enterprise stories, which were not as deadline sensitive. ~ Jill Abramson

The new breed of reporter doesn't drink, doesn't smoke, doesn't have sex beyond reproducing, and most importantly - doesn't believe. They don't believe they are there to question everything. They are there to print whatever is told to them. The news is dead, my friend. Buried under a mountain of full color advertising, and six-digit deposit slips. ~ Greg Crites

Having been aware of the Red Sox since the 1946 World Series, having been growled at by Ted Williams as a young reporter in 1960, having been present at the horror of 1986 and the comeback of 2004, I have seen the highs and lows of some other people's favorite team. ~ George Vecsey

badla desh bhagat kaa is suspenseful mystery novel it is story of patriotism soul who came in reporter body ~ Mahendra Verma

I am not an objective reporter. I prefer to go further, to the unstated things of our existence. What I can't understand and grasp seems to lead me. ~ Ray Metzker

Years later Nixon aide John Ehrlichman seemed to offer up a smoking gun when he told a reporter: The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did. ~ Chris Hayes

My mother's husband Harry Bloom was a writer, a novelist, a reporter, and an anti-apartheid activist. ~ Orlando Bloom

You know that things are not going well when you lose the moral high ground to a TMZ reporter, ~ John Oliver

You told us this place was haunted. How haunted is it?"

Paul cast a quick glance at the house. "I'm not sure. When they found the bodies twenty years ago, the place became off-limits. That was horror enough. There were whispers of strange stuff going on before then, but no one is alive who could verify a thing. Somehow, an urban legend grew about the whole island. "Don't go near haunted Ormsby Island. They say a reporter went out alone one night just after the mass murder had been discovered and never came back. Since anyone who had committed the murders was either dead or gone at that point, it had to be the island itself that offed the reporter. Mitch, Ormsby Island isn't even on most maps of Charleston Harbor. Locals will turn away the moment you even say its name. ~ Hunter Shea

Reporter lady: What's that color? John: Hm. I'd call this a color! ~ John Lennon

I'm no reporter. That's for the man with a suit and tie. I'm just relating to my people the best way I know, bringing them what they know and what they see out on the streets. I'm bringing it to them in a musical way, through a way of partying rather than violence. Now they can party their way through their problems. ~ Snoop Dogg

the chairman of Random House, Alberto Vitale, told a Wall Street Journal reporter about the new online bookselling sensation from the Pacific Northwest. ~ Brad Stone

Fear didn't suit me. ~ Gwenda Bond

Someday perhaps I'll have to get a grownup job ... but for now I'm having too much fun being a reporter. ~ Andrea Mitchell

By this point, it was clear she wasn't interested in continuing the relationship. What publication on earth would continue a relationship with a writer who would refuse to discuss her work with her editors? What publication would continue to publish a writer who attacked it on TV? What publication would continue to publish a writer who lied about it - on TV and to a Washington Post reporter? ... It's true: Ann is fearless, in person and in her writing. But fearlessness isn't an excuse for crappy writing or crappier behavior. ~ Jonah Goldberg

Bradlee had been recruited with the idea that the New York Times need nod exercise absolute preeminence in American journalism.
That vision had suffered a setback in 1971 when the Times published the Pentagon Papers. Though the Post was the second news organization to obtain a copy of the secret study of the Vietnam war, Bradlee noted that 'there was blood on every word' of the Times' initial stories. Bradlee could convey his opinions with a single disgusted glance at an indolent reporter or editor.
Carl Bernstein, Bob Woodward ~ Carl Bernstein

I can't swing a dead cat without hitting a reporter. ~ Russel Honore

Today's reporter is forced to become an educator more concerned with explaining the news than with being first on the scene. ~ Fred W. Friendly

As any editor will tell you, startling newsroom revelations are generally met with queries about where the information came from and how the reporter got it. Seriously startling revelations are followed by the vetting of libel lawyers. ~ Graydon Carter

In summer, most ramen restaurants in Tokyo serve hiyashi chūka, a cold ramen noodle salad topped with strips of ham, cucumber, and omelet; a tart sesame- or soy-based sauce; and sometimes other vegetables, like a tomato wedge or sheets of wakame seaweed. The vegetables are arranged in piles of parallel shreds radiating from the center to the edge of the plate like bicycle spokes, and you toss everything together before eating. It's bracing, ice-cold, addictive- summer food from the days before air conditioning.
In Oishinbo: Ramen and Gyōza, a young lifestyle reporter wants to write an article about hiyashi chūka. "I'm not interested in something like hiyashi chūka," says my alter ego Yamaoka. It's a fake Chinese dish made with cheap industrial ingredients, he explains.
Later, however, Yamaoka relents. "Cold noodles, cold soup, and cold toppings," he muses. "The idea of trying to make a good dish out of them is a valid one." Good point, jerk. He mills organic wheat into flour and hires a Chinese chef to make the noodles. He buys a farmyard chicken from an old woman to make the stock and seasons it with the finest Japanese vinegar, soy sauce, and sake. Yamaoka's mean old dad Kaibara Yūzan inevitably gets involved and makes an even better hiyashi chūka by substituting the finest Chinese vinegar, soy sauce, and rice wine.
When I first read this, I enjoyed trying to follow the heated argument over this dish I'd never even heard of. Yamaoka and Kaibara are in total a ~ Matthew Amster-Burton

A great reporter knows how to pull things out of others - idle gossip, rumors, facts - but one of her best weapons is her own careful silence" -Sydney Declay ~ Kathy Parks

It is not a camera, or a reporter that makes something real and genuine; more often a camera or a reporter does the opposite. ~ Curtis Sittenfeld

Literary truth is not the truth of the biographer or the reporter, it's not a police report or a sentence handed down by a court. It's not even the plausibility of a well-constructed narrative. Literary truth is entirely a matter of wording and is directly proportional to the energy that one is able to ­impress on the sentence. And when it works, there is no stereotype or cliché of popular literature that resists it. It reanimates, revives, subjects ­everything to its needs. ~ Elena Ferrante

We sat at long tables side by side in a big

dusty room where we laughed and carried

on until they told us to pipe down and paint.

The running joke was how we glowed,

the handkerchiefs we sneezed into lighting

up our purses when we opened them at night,

our lips and nails, painted for our boyfriends

as a lark, simmering white as ash in a dark room.

"Would you die for science?" the reporter asked us,

Edna and me, the main ones in the papers.

Science? We mixed up glue, water and radium

powder into a glowing greenish white paint

and painted watch dials with a little

brush, one number after another, taking

one dial after another, all day long,

from the racks sitting next to our chairs.

After a few strokes, the brush lost its shape,

and our bosses told us to point it with

our lips. Was that science?

I quit the watch factory to work in a bank

and thought I'd gotten class, more money,

a better life, until I lost a tooth in back

and two in front and my jaw filled up with sores.

We sued: Edna, Katherine, Quinta, Larice and me,

but when we got to court, not one of us

could raise our arms to take the oath.

My teeth were gone by then. "Pretty Grace

Fryer," they called me in the papers.

~ Eleanor Swanson

'The Hollywood Reporter' was always in. You always got great tables. You always got great seats at screenings. You always got treated well if you were at the paper. ~ Robert Osborne

Years ago, I did an interview about my mother for a publication called 'Info' magazine, and during that interview I told the reporter about my mother's leiomyosarcoma. She had had a hysterectomy, but at the time of it, the doctors didn't even think to look for sarcoma. ~ Peri Gilpin

Why not just tell people I'm an alien from Mars. Tell them I eat live chickens and do a voodoo dance at midnight. They'll believe anything you say, because you're a reporter. But if I, Michael Jackson, were to say, 'I'm an alien from Mars and I eat live chickens and do a voodoo dance at midnight', people would say, 'Oh, man, that Michael Jackson is nuts. He's cracked up. You can't believe a damn word that comes out of his mouth. ~ Michael J. Jackson

Florence Nightingale was never called "the Lady with the Lamp," but "the Lady with the Hammer," an image deftly readjusted by the war reporter of the Times since it was far too coarse for the folks back home. Far from gliding about the hospital with her lamp aloft, Nightingale earned her nickname through a ferocious attack on a locked storeroom when a military commander refused to give her the medical supplies she needed. ~ Rosalind Miles

I'm a novelist - not an expert on coal mining. I'm not a politician with an agenda to push. I'm not a reporter presenting facts, and I'm not a sociologist documenting the last struggling remnants of blue-collar America. I'm simply an author who sets her books in coal country because it's where I come from, and it's what I know. ~ Tawni O'Dell

And when I'd be reporting in Israel, Palestinians would say, the Jews they're not like us, and the Jews would say the same things about the Palestinians, they don't want what we want. And I never bought it as a reporter and I don't buy it as a novelist. I think, you know, the sound of somebody crying for their lost child sounds the same. ~ Geraldine Brooks

Know more about the situation you're facing than a reporter who is writing a major article would. ~ Laurie Beth Jones

I'm a reporter; you can't subpoena people to talk to you. If you write to them and try to call them on the phone and they don't answer or so forth, then take them unawares. ~ Mike Wallace

About 25 years ago, I started out as a reporter covering politics. And that sort of just evolved into organized crime, because organized crime and politics were the same thing in Boston. ~ Howie Carr

I'm a reporter. I'm not a scholar. ~ Peter Jennings

When I was talking to a reporter, she said, "Oh, you mean to live for the moment." I said, "No, it isn't that. That has a hedonistic ring to it. I mean to live in the moment. ~ Jon Kabat-Zinn

It's astonishing what you learn and feel and see along the way. That's why a reporter's job, as you know, is such a joy. ~ Mike Wallace

I would say the best moment of all was when I caught a 7.5-lb. perch in my lake. (Answering a reporter who asked him to name the best moment of his Presidency.) ~ George W. Bush

EPIGRAPH "There was a very strange connection. One of those odd collisions that happen. We were a little alike; I was an unhealthy child that was kept at home. So there was an unsaid feeling between us that was wonderful, an utter naturalness. We'd sit for hours and not say a word, and then she'd say something, and I'd answer her. A reporter once asked her what we talked about. She said, 'Nothing foolish.'" - Andrew Wyeth ~ Christina Baker Kline

Hillary Clinton, told a reporter that she and Bill aren't truly well-off, even though they're incredibly rich because they pay income taxes like everybody else. In fact, she says, they were so poor when they left the White House, they could hardly afford Bill's website memberships. ~ Peter Sagal

The reporter claimed he was going to write the article from my point of view. Instead, he made me sound like a little idiot. It made me never want to do another interview again. ~ Tia Carrere

It goes to show you how we in the press so often miss the big stories that are right under our noses. There is a famous journalistic legend about the time a young reporter covered the Johnstown flood of 1889. The kid wrote: God sat on a hillside overlooking Johnstown today and looked at the destruction He had wrought. His editor cabled back: Forget flood. Interview God. ~ Roger Ebert

I'm an expert on the NewsHour and it isn't how I practice journalism. I am not involved in the story. I serve only as a reporter or someone asking questions. I am not the story. ~ Jim Lehrer

Abraham Lincoln wasn't much of a dancer. "Miss Todd, I should like to dance with you in the worst way," he told his future wife. Miss Todd later said to a friend, "He certainly did."

"John Quincy Adams was a first-rate swimmer. Once when he was skinny-dipping in the Potomac River, a women reporter snatched his clothes and sat on them until he gave her an interview."

"(Andrew Johnson couldn't read until he was fourteen! He didn't learn to write until after he was married!) ~ Judith St. George

When we make a mistake, it becomes front-page news. We don't need any reporter telling us how badly we played. ~ Willie Stargell

A police reporter walks into the worst moment in someone's life on every single story that he covers. It's not like being a sports reporter. That's a great job and all that and takes certain skills. But, you know, they're glad to see you when you show up to cover the football game. Nobody is ever glad to see a police reporter when he shows up. ~ Bob Schieffer

Jennifer to Beth>> I don't know. Writing headlines, I guess. Reading the same stories over and over to make sure some idiot reporter didn't use "they're" when he should have used "their." Changing "which"es to "that"s. Arguing with someone about sequence of tenses. <> What on earth is sequence of tenses? <> It's top-secret copy editor stuff. < ~ Rainbow Rowell

The reporting I did was mostly entertainment or lifestyle. I took a very different approach than most reporters. I approached it more casually than you would think a reporter would. Now I'm a morning radio personality, and radio is really casual. ~ Eleanor Mondale

I'm an efficient, good, professional reporter. But I also write. And so what I try to do is write about places that I know that I care about intensely and write about them in a way that conveys the fact that I care. ~ Alma Guillermoprieto

What I will add as an perfect example of a man who is passionate of his work, without wife, everything giving, no information about his life like mother, father or something like this... I will give as an example NightClawer.
People often understand under this name some kind a horror, but unfortunately it's about a reporter and it's not horror. I will call it passion! ~ Deyth Banger

When I left her office, I felt like she'd gut-punched me, brushed me off, slapped me back and forth, gave me a cool compress to put on my cheeks, cold-cocked me with a stiff uppercut to the jaw, picked me up, brushed me off again, then kicked me in the seat of my pants as she handed me a piece of cake and showed me the door.
Being a reporter isn't as easy as it looks. ~ Christopher Paul Curtis

I never knew what a reporter looked like. ~ Dwayne Andreas

A reporter did a human-interest piece on the Texas Rangers. The reporter recognized the Colt Model 1911 the Ranger was carrying and asked him 'Why do you carry a 45?' The Ranger responded, 'Because they don't make a 46.' ~ Clint Smith

Having told the truth for years as a first-rate reporter, Jason Leopold now comes completely clean about himself and also sheds light on his imperiled profession. A riveting account of just how hard the truth can be. ~ Mark Crispin Miller

It's always unfortunate when a reporter is sent behind bars for failing to turn over sources. There's no way to say what the long-term outcome will be. ~ Judy Woodruff

Is it against the law to kill a reporter? ~ Bobby Fischer

Being a reporter seems a ticket out to the world. ~ Jackie Kennedy

They were going to the house of a man who was shot dead. What was with all the exuberance? But maybe that was the only way you could move forward after mindlessly recording stories of brutality and violence for days on end? Maybe detachment was the only way. But if you could not be passionate about your job, what was the point in doing it? ~ Shweta Ganesh Kumar

I know of no human being who has a better time than an eager and energetic young reporter. ~ H.L. Mencken

Gary Greenberg is a thoughtful comedian and a cranky philosopher and a humble pest of a reporter, equal parts Woody Allen, Kierkegaard, and Columbo. The Book of Woe is a profound, and profoundly entertaining, riff on malady, power, and truth. This book is for those of us (i.e. all of us) who've ever wondered what it means, and what's at stake, when we try to distinguish the suffering of the ill from the suffering of the human. ~ Gideon Lewis-Kraus

I wasn't the greatest reporter in the world, but I wasn't starting at zero. ~ Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr.

This is a love story," Michael Dean says, "but really what isn't? Doesn't the detective love the mystery or the chase, or the nosey female reporter who is even now being held against her wishes at an empty warehouse on the waterfront? Surely, the serial murder loves his victims, and the spy loves his gadgets, or his country or the exotic counterspy. The ice-trucker is torn between his love for ice and truck and the competing chefs go crazy for scallops, and the pawnshop guys adore their junk. Just as the housewives live for catching glimpses of their own botoxed brows in gilded hall mirrors and the rocked out dude on 'roids totally wants to shred the ass of the tramp-tatted girl on hookbook. Because this is reality, they are all in love, madly, truly, with the body-mic clipped to their back-buckle and the producer casually suggesting, "Just one more angle.", "One more jello shot.".

And the robot loves his master. Alien loves his saucer. Superman loves Lois. Lex and Lana. Luke loves Leia, til he finds out she's his sister. And the exorcist loves the demon, even as he leaps out the window with it, in full soulful embrace. As Leo loves Kate, and they both love the sinking ship. And the shark, god the shark, loves to eat. Which is what the Mafioso loves too, eating and money and Pauly and Omertà. The way the cowboy loves his horse, loves the corseted girl behind the piano bar and sometimes loves the other cowboy. As the vampire loves night and neck. And the zombie, do ~ Jess Walter

The deadlines are much, much longer with books. When I was a reporter, a lot of times I'd come in at 8:30 a.m., get an assignment right away, interview somebody, turn the story in by 9:30, and have the finished story in the paper that landed on my desk by noon. ~ Margaret Haddix

For most of my life, I would have automatically said that I would opt for conscientious objector status, and in general, I still would. But the spirit of the question is would I ever, and there are instances where I might. If immediate intervention would have circumvented the genocide in Rwanda or stopped the Janjaweed in Darfur, would I choose pacifism? Of course not. Scott Simon, the reporter for National Public Radio and a committed lifelong Quaker, has written that it took looking into mass graves in former Yugoslavia to convince him that force is sometimes the only option to deter our species' murderous impulses.

While we're on the subject of the horrors of war, and humanity's most poisonous and least charitable attributes, let me not forget to mention Barbara Bush (that would be former First Lady and presidential mother as opposed to W's liquor-swilling, Girl Gone Wild, human ashtray of a daughter. I'm sorry, that's not fair. I've no idea if she smokes.) When the administration censored images of the flag-draped coffins of the young men and women being killed in Iraq - purportedly to respect "the privacy of the families" and not to minimize and cover up the true nature and consequences of the war - the family matriarch expressed her support for what was ultimately her son's decision by saying on Good Morning America on March 18, 2003, "Why should we hear about body bags and deaths? I mean it's not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something ~ David Rakoff

People from small towns have to have their edges roughed up to get along in the world. But as a street reporter, you learn quickly. ~ Bill Kurtis

She nodded, jotting something in her notebook.
You're writing that down? Has the interview started?
Lee, whenever you're talking to a reporter, you're being interviewed. ~ Curtis Sittenfeld

A burro is an ass. A burrow is a hole in the ground. A reporter should know the difference. ~ Fred Reed

Read it to me."
"Seriously?" he said quietly. "You want me to read you poetry? Like saving your life ten times wasn't enough? ~ Brynn Kelly

He never asked me what I thought, and I never told him what I thought, because in my view that's the way a journalist ought to behave. You ought not to be going around to people volunteering your feelings. That's daily journalism. ~ Janet Malcolm

One of the great myths about war is that there is a ground zero, a center stage, where the terrible forces unleashed by it can be witnessed, recounted, and replayed like the launching of a rocket. War is a human activity far too large to be contained in the experience of a single reporter in a single place and time in any meaningful way. When it comes, it happens to everyone. Everything is in its path. Yet this is the allure of war reporting, the chance of acquiring some personal mother lode of truth to beam back to the living rooms of a waiting nation. The fear that comes from reporting on a war is as much a fear of missing this mother load as it is of being injured or killed in battle, and it sets reporters apart from the people who have to fight wars. Soldiers have their own agonies to think about as a battle approaches. Missing the war is not generally one of them. ~ John Hockenberry