Edith Wharton Quotes

History is a distillation of rumor.

History: Gossip well told.

I would be lying if I said the journalism doesn't reflect my own choices as a reporter and a writer: what to say, what to emphasize, how to say it, what is true or untrue.

From journalism I learned to write under pressure, to work with deadlines, to have limited space and time, to conduct and interview, to find information, to research, and above all, to use language as efficiently as possible and to remember always that there is a reader out there.

I'm not sure I would make a direct connection between having press attention as a young person and being interested in the media as an older person. I came to it more organically, coming from a family of Irish Catholic storytellers. Storytelling is a pastime and important part of my family's history and culture.

The opera tells the story with all the built-in contradictions and from many different angles.

Journalism allows its readers to witness history; fiction gives its readers an opportunity to live it.

The word of the mouth is a very powerful thing and you can say something about someone that is not necessarily true, but people will believe it and it will become a constant reminder and every time that your name is bought up, that will come up.

My role is to bear witness and to bring back what people see and tell you.

News is the first rough draft of history.

Evil news fly faster still than good.

Today’s headlines and history’s judgment are rarely the same.

A good urban legend is something that actually did happen but it got twisted in the telling over time.

Time is a wonderful storyteller.

Word spread because word will spread. Stories and secrets fight, stories win, shed new secrets, which new stories fight, and on.

History is about who tells it.

In my writing, I try to combine all my favorite elements of journalism - accuracy, real characters that exist on this planet - with all my favorite elements of literature: a sense of flow, of propulsion, of wanting to read every sentence.

You want to get both sides of the story and it's my role to try and bring that out of people.

I think that as reporters we certainly bring to bear our own set of experiences, our backgrounds, to our reporting.

Storytellers all, we humans might run out of time even as we triumph over the problem of running out of space. But we will never run out of stories.

Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories ar for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.

The first thing, the first element of a story that people hear, they believe it. Whether it's right or wrong.

Myth is much more important and true than history. History is just journalism and you know how reliable that is.

A woman and a mouse, they carry a tale wherever they go.

Just so you know, when they say "once upon a time"....they're lying. It's not once upon a time. Its not even twice upon a time. It's hundreds of times, over and over, every time someone opens up the pages of this dusty old book.