P. J. O'Rourke Quotes

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.

Well, my background is journalism. I don't have any creative-writing experience except for one class I took as a sophomore in college.

I started on the fringes of journalism as a cartoonist on The Daily Mail.

I want to be a journalist; I want to ask tough questions.

I started at 'The Daily Telegraph' as a daily news reporter. I moved then to 'The Guardian,' and then I moved to New York as the correspondent for 'The Guardian,' moved to 'The Times of London.' And really, it was the best job you could imagine. You could cover any story you wanted in America.

Very early in my career, I almost went to journalism school.

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

Journalism has been very important for me - for a long time I made my living as a journalist, and it also serves as a source of ideas. Many of the things I have written I would not have written without the experience of being a journalist.

Journalism is just the art of capturing behavior.

I am not a new journalist, whatever that is. I just sit here at the typewriter and bang away at the old forms.

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 respect journalism. I was always very aware of journalism from a very broad point of view, but I'd say my baptism by fire was doing the Donald Margulies play Time Stands Still. That for me was a real education because I spent a lot of time with some incredible journalists, war reporters particularly - Bob Woodruff, Dexter Filkins - people who were very helpful in painting the picture for me and reading the accounts of people and what they experienced, a lot of PTSD.

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.

I always wanted to be a serious journalist.

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

The best writers who have put pen to paper have often had a journalism background.

When I left Toronto and entered journalism in the late 1990s, I had many notions about the news business, nearly all of them wrong, as it turned out.

I started as a print reporter.

I come from a newspaper background, so maybe I'm attuned to current events.

I'm really not a journalist, and I don't do a ton of newsy pieces. Occasionally I'll write about something that's going on recently, but I really don't do a ton of stuff that's tied to current events.

I didn't work for any newspapers in college, never worked for any newspaper before 'The Washington Post'.

Journalism was looked upon as a more noble thing than it is now. I don't know if it carries the same cachet that it did then.

Andy Stasiuk was a newsman of the old school of front-page journalism - tough, knowledgeable, cynical, single-minded and fun. He covered the news as a happy warrior in an era of cutthroat editorial competition.

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

CBS fought very hard on this because it believed and believes that there's a principle at stake here. The principle is that Dan Rather doesn't work for the police, and that people that speak to Dan Rather understand that he's a journalist and not a police agent.