I find I journalize too tediously. Let me try to abbreviate.
—James Boswell (1740–95) Scottish Biographer, Diarist
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 (1904–81) English Journalist
Every journalist owes tribute to the evil one.
—Jean de La Fontaine (1621–95) French Poet, Short Story Writer
In journalism it is simpler to sound off than it is to find out. It is more elegant to pontificate than it is to sweat.
—Harold Evans (1925–2020) British-American Journalist, Writer
The man must have a rare recipe for melancholy, who can be dull in Fleet Street.
—Charles Lamb (1775–1834) British Essayist, Poet
Journalism consists largely in saying “Lord James is dead” to people who never knew Lord James was alive.
—G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) English Journalist, Novelist, Essayist, Poet
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 (1932–2003) English Spy Fiction Writer
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.
—Janet Malcolm (1934–2021) American Writer, New Yorker Journalist
I get up in the morning with an idea for a three-volume novel and by nightfall it’s a paragraph in my column.
—Don Marquis (1878–1937) American Humorist, Journalist, Author
Write the news as if your very life depended on it. It does!
—Heywood Hale Broun (1918–2001) American Journalist, Commentator, Actor
Our job is like a baker’s work—his rolls are tasty as long as they’re fresh; after two days they’re stale; after a week, they’re covered with mould and fit only to be thrown out.
—Ryszard Kapuscinski (1932–2007) Polish Journalist
Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be grasped at once.
—Cyril Connolly (1903–74) British Literary Critic, Writer
If I’d written all the truth I knew for the past ten years, about 600 people—including me—would be rotting in prison cells from Rio to Seattle today. Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism.
—Hunter S. Thompson (1937–2005) American Journalist
Most rock journalism is people who can’t write, interviewing people who can’t talk, for people who can’t read.
—Frank Zappa (1940–93) American Rock Guitarist, Singer, Composer
In the real world, nothing happens at the right place at the right time. It is the job of journalists and historians to correct that.
—Mark Twain (1835–1910) American Humorist
Journalism is literature in a hurry.
—Matthew Arnold (1822–88) English Poet, Critic
Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one.
—A. J. Liebling (1904–63) American Journalist, Press Critic
I see journalists as the manual workers, the laborers of the word. Journalism can only be literature when it is passionate.
—Marguerite Duras (1914–96) French Novelist, Playwright
A petty reason perhaps why novelists more and more try to keep a distance from journalists is that novelists are trying to write the truth and journalists are trying to write fiction.
—Graham Greene (1904–1991) British Novelist, Short Story Writer, Playwright
The real news is bad news.
—Marshall Mcluhan (1911–80) Canadian Writer, Thinker, Educator
Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction. Life is one world, and life seen in the newspapers another.
—G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) English Journalist, Novelist, Essayist, Poet
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.
—Janet Malcolm (1934–2021) American Writer, New Yorker Journalist
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 (1947–2022) American Journalist, Political Satirist
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 (1923–2007) American Novelist Essayist
We need not be theologians to see that we have shifted responsibility for making the world interesting from God to the newspaperman.
—Daniel J. Boorstin (1914–2004) American Historian, Academic, Attorney
I hate journalists. There is nothing in them but tittering jeering emptiness. They have all made what Dante calls the Great Refusal. The shallowest people on the ridge of the earth.
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) Irish Poet, Dramatist
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.
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish Poet, Playwright
I think there ought to be a club in which preachers and journalists could come together and have the sentimentalism of the one matched with the cynicism of the other. That ought to bring them pretty close to the truth.
—Reinhold Niebuhr (1892–1971) American Christian Theologian
Journalism is organized gossip.
—Edward Eggleston (1837–1902) American Historian, Novelist
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 (1935–2024) American Journalist, Author, Long-time Editor of Harper’s Magazine
Leave a Reply