Peter York Quotes

I love Gene Weingarten's feature writing with the passion of a thousand suns.

Great questions make great reporting.

I don't think journalism changes. It's about digging into stories and telling them well. The basic tenets of great reporting stay the same while things around it change. Technology has made reporting easier, but it has also caused job loss. Social media has increased discussion around topics, but it has its own challenges at times.

I've had a lot of fun, and when I talk to kids in journalism schools, I say, look, I know what the journalism teachers tell you that this is a great way to perform public service and all that, but I say the main reason, if you decide what you want to do is be a reporter, the main reason you want to do it is because it's just so much fun.

I always lamented that I wasn't a writer during the late '60s and the early '70s, with the New Journalism and Tom Wolfe and Hunter Thompson and all those people.

Nonfiction that uses novelistic devices and strategies to shape the work. That's material that I really like.

You can tell a more over-the-top incredible story if you use a nonfiction form.

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.

Obviously, in journalism, you're confined to what happens. And the tendency to embellish, to mythologize, it's in us. It makes things more interesting, a closer call. But journalism taught me how to write a sentence that would make someone want to read the next one.

You know there's some great folks, great story telling at 'Dateline,' and I'm glad to be a part of it.

I feel I'm functioning at some level as a journalist because even though I write fiction, I'm trying to get the world accurate.

I am not one of the great journalists of my time.

I have gone on the air and announced my telephone number at the Washington Post. I go into the night, talking to people, looking for things. The great dreaded thing every reporter lives with is what you don't know. The source you didn't go to. The phone call you didn't return.

The people who are writing online and the people in my genre of creative non-fiction exert a great deal more freedom that journalists are allowed to exert in their day-to-day work.

I have no idea who coined the term 'the New Journalism,' or when it was coined. I have never even liked the term. Any movement, group, party, program, philosophy or theory that goes under a name with 'new' in it is just begging for trouble, of course.

I am not a pure fiction writer, nor am I an academic writer. Somehow I ended up in this blended area of literary journalism.

I am a writer who happens to use some tools of journalism.

If I weren't acting, I'd study journalism because I love to write.

There is certainly no want of journalistic ambition among the purveyors of what is now called 'long-form,' nor of novelistic technique brought to bear on nonfiction, nor of outrage.

If you wish to write well, study the life about you,--life in the public streets.

And there are two types of stories. One type is one's own story. The other type is telling the stories of others. Thanks to this genre, writers of nonfiction can now use the tools of the reporter, the points of view and ear for dialog of a novelist, and the passion and wordplay of the poet.

Reportage is interesting only when placed in a fictional context, but fiction is interesting only if it is validated by a documentary context.

Creative nonfiction writers do not make things up; they make ideas and information that already exist more interesting and often more accessible.

Growing up, I wanted to be a journalist. I was in love with Lisa Ling, who's a broadcast journalist and who travels the world. I used to read all of her articles and watch her when she'd go to China or South Africa or Australia. I thought that was the coolest job because she got to travel and tell people's stories.

Journalism combines adventure with culture.