Journalist Quotes

But unfortunately, I have to say, one out of every 100 interviews I do, I get a real journalist.

If a person is not talented enough to be a novelist, not smart enough to be a lawyer, and his hands are too shaky to perform operations, he becomes a journalist.

A journalist is a person who has mistaken their calling.

Every journalist owes tribute to the evil one.

I wanted to be a fashion journalist and went to the London College of Fashion to do a journalism and promotion course.

Journalist: a person without any ideas but with an ability to express them;

a writer whose skill is improved by a deadline: the more time he has, the worse he writes.

The desire to become a journalist came really because I very much like living abroad, and like to travel, and wanted to be paid for it.

Every journalist has a novel in him, which is an excellent place for it.

It was when reporters became journalists and when objectivity gave way to searching for truth, that an aura of distrust and fear arose around the New Journalist.

I wanted to be an editor or a journalist, I wasn't really interested in being an entrepreneur, but I soon found I had to become an entrepreneur in order to keep my magazine going.

Art is a private thing, the artist makes it for himself;

a comprehensible work is the product of a journalist. We need works that are strong, straight, precise, and forever beyond understanding.

I am a writer, a professional journalist with serious credentials in Crime, Craziness, and Politics. I have mingled with dangerous criminals and attended many trials . . . from Hell's Angels, Black Panthers and Chicano street fighters to Roxanne Pulitzer and even Richard Nixon, back in the good old days before he was run out of the White House for fraud, perjury, graft, and criminal negligence.

I review novels to make money, because it is easier for a sluggard to write an article a fortnight than a book a year, because the writer is soothed by the opiate of action, the crank by posing as a good journalist, and having an air hole. I dislike it. I do it and I am always resolving to give it up.

Journalism without a moral position is impossible.

Every journalist is a moralist. It's absolutely unavoidable. A journalist is someone who looks at the world and the way it works, someone who takes a close look at things every day and reports what she sees, someone who represents the world, the event, for others. She cannot do her work without judging what she sees.

More than illness or death, the American journalist fears standing alone against the whim of his owners or the prejudices of his audience. Deprive William Safire of the insignia of the New York Times, and he would have a hard time selling his truths to a weekly broadsheet in suburban Duluth.

Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.

The dominant and most deep-dyed trait of the journalist is his timorousness.

Where the novelist fearlessly plunges into the water of self-exposure, the journalist stands trembling on the shore in his beach robe. The journalist confines himself to the clean, gentlemanly work of exposing the grieves and shames of others.

A journalist is basically a chronicler, not an interpreter of events.

Where else in society do you have the license to eavesdrop on so many different conversations as you have in journalism? Where else can you delve into the life of our times?

I am a journalist and, under the modern journalist's code of Olympian objectivity (and total purity of motive), I am absolved of responsibility. We journalists don't have to step on roaches. All we have to do is turn on the kitchen light and watch the critters scurry.

If, for instance, they have heard something from the postman, they attribute it to a semi-official statement; if they have fallen into conversation with a stranger at a bar, they can conscientiously describe him as a source that has hitherto proved unimpeachable. It is only when the journalist is reporting a whim of his own, and one to which he attaches minor importance, that he defines it as the opinion of well-informed circles.

It was a fatal day when the public discovered that the pen is mightier than the paving-stone, and can be made as offensive as the brickbat. They at once sought for the journalist, found him, developed him, and made him their industrious and well-paid servant. It is greatly to be regretted, for both their sakes.

You cannot hope to bribe or twist (thank God!) the British journalist.

But, seeing what the man will do unbribed, there's no occasion to.

A playwright is the litmus paper of the arts.

He's got to be, because if he isn't working on the same wave length as the audience, no one would know what in hell he was talking about. He is a kind of psychic journalist, even when he's great.

The only reason one will respect you as a journalist is because of your integrity. Your integrity is based on your credibility. Your credibility comes from your truthfulness. All these come from you submitting yourself as a servant of the truth, a servant of issues.

Assange is not a 'journalist' any more than the 'editor' of al-Qaeda's new English-language magazine 'Inspire' is a 'journalist.' He is an anti-American operative with blood on his hands.

A journalist is supposed to present an unbiased portrait of an event, a view devoid of intimate emotions. This is impossible, of course. The framing of an image, by its very composition, represents a choice. The photographer chooses what to show and what to exclude.

When I was 20, journalists would ask me what I would do when I retire from waterpolo. For me this is not just a five- or ten-year-period in my life. This is life itself.

If my name had not been cleared, it would have been difficult, perhaps impossible, to continue as a journalist.

The judgment means a lot. As a journalist being accused of invading someone's privacy, there is always a risk that it will stick to your name.

Why would anyone ever tell anything personal to a journalist?

I wrote my first real murder story as a journalist for the Daytona Beach News Journal in 1980. It was about a body found in the woods. Later, the murder was linked to a serial killer who was later caught and executed for his crimes.

I pride myself on having a journalistic remove.

I am a journalist in the field of etiquette.

I try to find out what the most genteel people regularly do, what traditions they have discarded, what compromises they have made.

I became a journalist to come as close as possible to the heart of the world.

Nothing is more idealistic than a journalist on the defensive.

The homosexual community wants me to be gay.

The heterosexual community wants me to be straight. Every writer thinks, I'm the journalist who's going to make him talk. I pray for them. I pray that they get a life and stop living mine!

A long life in journalism convinced me many presidents ago that there should be a large air space between a journalist and the head of a state.

I am satisfied that all politicians were meant to be journalists and all journalists meant to be politicians.

Before acting, I wanted to become a journalist.

I also toyed with the idea of being a chef - but that's only when people asked me what I wanted to be. In fact, I always used to say I wanted to be an actor, but I didn't ever believe that I was good enough to be come one.

The impulse of the journalist is to be novel, yet to relate his curiosities to the urgencies of the moment; the philosopher seeks what he conceives to be true, regardless of the moment.

I wanted to be a journalist, I thought it was glamorous and that I'd meet beautiful women in the rain.

I've learned in my years as a journalist that when a politician says 'That's ridiculous' you're probably on the right track.

I am not insecure about being a journalist.

As a print journalist, you can be frustrated by people who don't call you back, parts of the story you can't get. TV gets you access to everyone because people call you back. It also allows you to satisfy your curiosity. I am a very curious person.

As a journalist, the details always tell the story.

The typical journalist's typical lead for the typical Canadian story nowadays is along this line: that Canadians are hard at work trying to gain a reputation as a nation of rapid social change.

The responsibility that I feel is to do as good a job as a journalist as I can possibly do.

Any journalist worth his or her salt wouldn't trust me.

Only two journalists followed the team around.

It's a journalist's job to be a witness to history.

We're not there to worry about ourselves. We're there to try and get as near as we can, in an imperfect world, to the truth and get the truth out.