Edward R. Murrow Quotes

I'm very lucky, because my beat is current events. And events are changing all the time.

I didn't care for beat reporting, covering the same thing day after day - short attention span.

There's nothing more exciting than to watch a story break and grow, and to be the first one to present it to the world.

Journalists know that often you don't grab stories, they grab you.

I'm a journalist, I run to the fire, that's what we do.

When you're in the news business, you always expect the unexpected.

I take a certain pride in having maintained a reputation for fast copy throughout my newspaper career. Fast-breaking stories left my typewriter in a hurry. Not great literature, perhaps, but fast, and usually accurate.

Journalism is literature in a hurry.

My own career started in New York at the 'Associated Press', a fast-paced news agency where we rarely had time for deep reporting.

When I worked in Los Angeles covering hard news, very often when something important would happen I'd be off in the woods covering something unimportant, which was more interesting to me.

Journalism is in fact history on the run.

The meat-and-potatoes work of world journalism is performed by the wire service reporters.

I really think more fledgling novelists - and many current and even established novelists - should get out into the real world and cover local politics, sports, culture, and crime and write it up on deadline.

The one thing a lifetime in the newspaper business teaches you is pace - you spend all your time trying to make sure that the reader's going to finish what you're writing.

Surely the glory of journalism is its transience.

I was a news reporter for 16 years, seven of them a foreign correspondent in the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. Perhaps the most useful equipment I acquired in that time is a lack of preciousness about the act of writing. A reporter must write. There must be a story. The mot juste unarriving? Tell that to your desk.

I do know something about the news world. I was sitting on the floors of newsrooms since I was seven years old, and I've been around them my whole life. I understand that someone looks at a story with famous people in it, and you want to put it out.

Journalism: an ability to meet the challenge of filling the space.

I don't think, as a journalist, I'd ever get a story written. I'd probably spend five years researching it, and by the time I'd finish it, no one would be interested in it anymore.

Just ask my boss - any time a major story breaks, I'm banging on his door to send me.

Journalism is about bringing people to an event or something that they couldn't attend.

I've really gotten to play a lot of different things, starting with 'Southpaw.' For 'Spotlight,' I got to play this amazing journalist, Sacha Pfeiffer, who worked at the 'Boston Globe' when they broke the story about the sex scandal in the Catholic Church.

Anybody who's spent thirteen or fourteen years in print journalism has a lot of stories he thinks were inwardly satisfying as far as preparation, understanding, and diligence.

As a journalist, you're always worried, 'Did I get the full story?'