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Quotes by Journalist
"Most people - and particularly people whose lives have nothing to do with books at all - are intrigued by the idea that somebody wants to listen to them and get it right."
"I wanted to be a columnist so badly that I took a huge pay cut to leave Forbes, which wouldn't give me a column, and join Newsday, which wanted my column for its Sunday business section."
"People are treating the Stewart case as seriously as Enron when it's really over trivia."
"When I started writing a business column 15 years ago, I knew I'd found the perfect job for myself. As a columnist I could pick my own topic, do my own analysis, say what I wanted to say and attribute it to myself. Best of all, I could write in my own voice."
"The lesson that any thinking person draws from the Stewart saga is that when the government asks questions, run for your lawyer and don't say a word. Had Stewart kept her mouth shut, she'd be OK."
"The column's worked out great for me. I've gotten a ton of ego satisfaction, had a lot of fun, won a batch of prizes and occasionally done some public good."
"Teamwork is better than isolation, especially for a columnist."
"Report, report, report. Dig, dig, dig. Think, think, think. Don't stop being a reporter because you've become a columnist."
"It's easy to write a good column if you've got good information. It's hard if you have to depend on style alone. I suppose there are people who can get away with styling on a regular basis. I'm not one of them. You're probably not, either."
"I've spent my career trying to help people without connections understand what's going on so that they have a chance of getting a fair shake from the connected and the powerful."
"I grew up in an environment of jokes and sarcasm and puns. I talk that way, so I write that way."
"Go for the gold: better one great column and some undistinguished ones than constant mediocrity."
"Don't commit to being a columnist unless you're willing to do it right. Report your behind off, so you have something original and useful to say. Say it in a way that will interest someone other than you, your family and your sources."
"If the government decides to put your life under a microscope, do you think it won't find something? I suspect there's not an adult in the country who would walk away totally unscathed if every aspect of his or her life were investigated the way Stewart's ImClone trading was."
"In journalistic terms, syndication is equivalent to ascending to heaven on a pillar of cloud."
"Jerusalem is a festival and a lamentation. Its song is a sigh across the ages, a delicate, robust, mournful psalm at the great junction of spiritual cultures."
"Watching foreign affairs is sometimes like watching a magician; the eye is drawn to the hand performing the dramatic flourishes, leaving the other hand - the one doing the important job - unnoticed."
"Loving can cost a lot but not loving always costs more, and those who fear to love often find that want of love is an emptiness that robs the joy from life."
"You can employ men and hire hands to work for you, but you must win their hearts to have them work with you."
"The act is unjustifiable that either begs for a blessing, or, having succeeded gives no thanksgiving."
"One often learns more from ten days of agony than ten years of contentment."
"Friends are like windows through which you see out into the world and back into yourself. If you don't have friends you see much less than you otherwise might."
"Through tattered clothes, small vices do appear. Robes and furred gowns hide all."
"I think the American Dream for most people is just survival."
"Journalists belong in the gutter because that is where the ruling classes throw their guilty secrets."
"It is a sad day for our country when the moral foundation of our law and the acknowledgment of God has to be hidden from public view to appease a federal judge."
"Even at the United Nations, where legend has it that the building was designed so that there could be no corner offices, the expanse of glass in individual offices is said to be a dead giveaway as to rank. Five windows are excellent, one window not so great."
"What's bad for the country is always good for The Nation."
"Show me a man who is a good loser and I'll show you a man who is playing golf with his boss."
"Baseball is a game where a curve is an optical illusion, a screwball can be a pitch or a person, stealing is legal and you can spit anywhere you like except in the umpire's eye or on the ball."
"Never forget the power of silence, that massively disconcerting pause which goes on and on and may at last induce an opponent to babble and backtrack nervously."
"Vatican II was a force that seized the mind of the Roman Catholic Church and carried it across centuries from the 13th to the 20th."
"The real 1960s began on the afternoon of November 22, 1963. It came to seem that Kennedy's murder opened some malign trap door in American culture, and the wild bats flapped out."
"The Church became both more accessible and less imposing. It threw itself open to risk."
"A rattlesnake loose in the living room tends to end all discussion of animal rights."
"He vanished to the public in order to materialize for his family."
"As they marched, the crowds lining the route broke into applause, a sweet and deeply felt spontaneous pattering that was a sort of communal embrace. Welcome home."
"Change is the only constant. Hanging on is the only sin."
"A Chicago alderman once confessed he needed physical exercise but didn't like jogging, because in that sport you couldn't hit anyone."
"Calling O'Hare an airport is like calling the Queen Elizabeth II a boat."
"The car trip can draw the family together, as it was in the days before television when parents and children actually talked to each other."
"Giving jazz the Congressional seal of approval is a little like making Huck Finn an honorary Boy Scout."
"It is one test of a fully developed writer that he reminds us of no one but himself."
"Journalists do not like to report on uncertainties. They would almost rather be wrong than ambiguous."
"Nothing is more idealistic than a journalist on the defensive."
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