Isabel Allende Quotes

Journalism is a craft that takes years to learn. It's like golf. You never get it right all the time. It's a game of fewer errors, better facts, and better reporting.

I think the most important thing journalism taught me is to mine for details. The details are key. You can't try to be funny or strange or poignant; you have to let the details be funny or strange or poignant for you.

I have long argued that no one should be allowed to write opinion without spending years as a reporter - nothing like interviewing all four eyewitnesses to an automobile accident and then trying to write an accurate account of what happened.

The most profound lessons about journalism I've learned have been taught to me by the people I've covered.

Journalists like to talk and write and produce, but the most important part of that process is learning how to listen. And that's what makes you a good journalist.

See, I have no journalism in my background, so I wasn't practised at research or writing non-fiction, nor at handling the truth in a journalistic way. Journalists know when to call a halt and write something, but I kept on looking for answers.

A good journalist is modest; his only job is simple: to decide what counts as news.

I'm an inexperienced reporter, and I'm still learning.

I think the idea of fact-checking, I think the idea that you come up through a system where you know how to cover night cops, and then you go on, and you go on to various beats, including writing obituaries, and you get names right, you know how to spell them, really has some advantages to it.

A news sense is really a sense of what is important, what is vital, what has color and life — what people are interested in. That's journalism.

It's about being right and trying to get the facts and get the story right, and inform, you know, the readership or the viewership. And there are some reporters that do that.

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.

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

In most daily journalism, you only fact-check something if it seems a little fishy.

As a journalist, the details always tell the story.

Great questions make great reporting.

My job is to get to the heart of a story, to find out what's really going on; to get it verified and, then, to get it out to as many people as possible as fast as.

Having been a journalist for thirty-nine years, I've developed a pretty thick skin.

Journalism makes you think fast. You have to speak to people in all walks of life. Especially local journalism.

Good journalism, I think, represents life and if you try to organize something too neatly it usually blows up in your face and doesn't really happen the way you want it to.

There's an old saw about journalism that the more you know about a subject, the less sense reporting about it makes.

I started as a print reporter.

I was once a journalist. And I think of myself as a journalist, and that's it. You tell the truth. I even wrote a book called 'The Truth'.

If you're a reporter, the easiest thing in the world is to get a story. The hardest thing is to verify. The old sins were about getting something wrong, that was a cardinal sin. The new sin is to be boring.

If you're a journalist - and I think, on some level, I'm a journalist, and proud to be a journalist, or a documentarian, however you want to describe it - part of what I do has to be the pursuit of the truth.