Charles Portis Quotes

I had an idea in the beginning to do a book about some of the events that I had covered, just various stories that I've covered. Reporters spend a lot of time telling each other tales about how they covered stories, and that's what this book started out to be.

A reporter is always concerned with tomorrow. There's nothing tangible of yesterday. All I can say I've done is agitate the air ten or fifteen minutes and then boom - it's gone.

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.

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

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

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.

I love covering stories that have huge historic impacts.

When you are a journalist and there is a big story like Dominic Cummings, it's great to be at the heart of it. What I love, and it sounds a bit cheesy, is you feel connected to other people.

A lot of college graduates approach me about becoming screenwriters. I tell them, 'Do not become a screenwriter, become a journalist,' because journalists go into worlds that are not their own. Kids who go to Hollywood write coming-of-age stories for their first scripts, about what happened to them when they were sixteen. Then they write the summer camp script. At the age of twenty-three they haven't produced anything, and that's the end of the career.

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

That's a paradox I've noticed, too: The news business held little romance for me, yet writing about it somehow stirred my affections.

Journalism is literature in a hurry.

I've been getting pulled from newspapers for my entire career.

Well I just always wanted to be a newspaper reporter.

I'm a journalist; I love doing interviews, and I hope that will continue.

My father was a journalist.

Most of the stories I have covered in 45 years have been gray stories.

Journalism largely consists of saying 'Lord Jones is Dead' to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive.

Ultimately if you're a journalist, one day you're writing about figure skating, one day a political debate. I loved that about reporting. I like throwing my energies into various corners of the world.

I can't think of any other job in journalism where the newsmakers come to you.

I think there's always satisfaction that comes from digging in and telling a story and being on the front line and writing about it. I think there's a venue available if you look. Even print journalism is in good shape in areas.

When I got a little older, I started writing for the high school newspaper, 'The Maroon Wave,' and that's when I fell in love with journalism.

For many years I was engaged in journalism, writing articles and chronicles for the daily press without ever joining the staff of any newspaper.

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

I wrote newspaper articles professionally for seven years, and I love newspapers.