Nora Ephron Quotes

No reporter of my generation, whatever his genius, ever really rated spats and a walking stick until he had covered both a lynching and a revolution.

David Carr was one of the most gifted journalists who has ever worked at The New York Times.

Journalism is one set of tools - one toolkit I have. One vocabulary, one lens.

Given my calling I had to stumble across people who felt the same way. I was a young reporter.

Journalism is just the art of capturing behavior.

The plain truth is that the reporter's trade is for young men. Your feet, which do the legwork, are nine times more important than your head, which fits the facts into a coherent pattern.

I pine for a return to the type of old-school journalism and the tough newspapermen and women of the Thirties.

Being a journalist seemed the ideal way of both having a job and experiencing the world, especially for anyone with a sense of adventure.

I had grown up as a feature writer, and basically my career had been in The National Lampoon and as a magazine editor, and I'd never been a reporter.

Working as a journalist is exactly like being a wallflower at an orgy.

[On journalists:] We are a noisy, imperfect lot, struggling to scribble what has been called the first draft of history.

Journalism is not a precise science, it's a crude art

journalism was for me more than a business or a profession. It was a way of living, of experiencing the world even as I instantly distanced myself from it, in order to recreate what I'd witnessed for the public.

Essentially, there is no media, folks. There just isn't any media in the sense that there are reporters out there uncovering things you and I don't know and telling us what they are.

Journalists are interesting. They just aren't as interesting as the things they cover.

I hate newspapermen. They come into camp and pick up their camp rumors and print them as facts. I regard them as spies, which, in truth, they are.

The whole sort of debate of classic objective journalism versus a new immersion journalism - that can go on forever... I made no bones about my position: I don't think you can be objective.

The one thing I didn't do that was kind of controversial was go work for a daily paper, because I didn't like that kind of journalism, and I'm glad I didn't because that's the business model that's going totally extinct.

I'm in the business, as a journalist, of asking tough questions.

A good newspaper is never nearly good enough but a lousy newspaper is a joy forever.

Journalists follow authority as sharks follow a liner, dining on the scraps that are thrown overboard.

There are a lot of people who think our job is to reassure the public every night that their home, their community and their nation is safe. I don't subscribe to that at all. I subscribe to leaving people with essentially … a rough draft of history. Some days it's reassuring, some days it's absolutely destructive.

My job is to cover the news and do it accurately and fair. And we do.

My dream was to do political journalism.

Journalists always want publishers or editors to leave. They're creative troublemakers - that's why you hire them.