Journalism Quotes

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.

P. J. O'Rourke

Most rock journalism is people who can't write, interviewing people who can't talk, for people who can't read.

Frank Zappa

Opinionated writing is always the most difficult... simply because it involves retaining in the cold morning-after crystal of the printed word the burning flow of molten feeling.

Gavin Lyall

I still believe that if your aim is to change the world, journalism is a more immediate short-term weapon.

Tom Stoppard

We now demand the light artillery of the intellect; we need the curt, the condensed, the pointed, the readily diffused -- in place of the verbose, the detailed, the voluminous, the inaccessible. On the other hand, the lightness of the artillery should not degenerate into pop-gunnery -- by which term we may designate the character of the greater portion of the newspaper press -- their sole legitimate object being the discussion of ephemeral matters in an ephemeral manner.

Edgar Allan Poe

Reasons for not keeping a notebook: 1) the ambiguity of the reader

Lionel Trilling, Notebook entry,

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.

Norman Mailer

Journalism is organized gossip.

Edward Eggleston

Ten years before --- even five --- I had been the same way. I wanted it all and I wanted it fast and no obstacle was big enough to put me off. Since then I have learned that some things were bigger than they looked from a distance, and now I was not so sure anymore just what I was going to get or even what I deserved.

Hunter S. Thompson, Songs Of The

Journalism is the entertainment business.

Frank Herbert

What a squalid and irresponsible little profession it is. Nothing prepares you for how bad Fleet Street really is until it craps on you from a great height.

Ken Livingstone

Europe has a press that stresses opinions; America a press, radio, and television that emphasize news.

James Reston

Evidently there are plenty of people in journalism who have neither got what they liked nor quite grown to like what they get. They write pieces they do not much enjoy writing, for papers they totally despise, and the sad process ends by ruining their style and disintegrating their personality, two developments which in a writer cannot be separate, since his personality and style must progress or deteriorate together, like a married couple in a country where death is the only permissible divorce.

Claud Cockburn

Journalism justifies its own existence by the great Darwinian principle of the survival of the vulgarist

Oscar Wilde

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.

Lewis H. Lapham

In America journalism is apt to be regarded as an extension of history: in Britain, as an extension of conversation.

Anthony Sampson

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.

Humbert Wolfe

The man must have a rare recipe for melancholy, who can be dull in Fleet Street.

Charles Lamb

Personal columnists are jackals and no jackal has been known to live on grass once he had learned about meat -- no matter who killed the meat for him.

Ernest Hemingway

When you put your hand to the plow, you can't put it down until you get to the end of the row.

Alice Paul