Molly Ivins Quotes

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.

In most daily journalism, you only fact-check something if it seems a little fishy.

See, I have no journalism in my background, so I wasn't practised at research or writing non-fiction, nor at handling the truth in a journalistic way. Journalists know when to call a halt and write something, but I kept on looking for answers.

A good journalist is modest; his only job is simple: to decide what counts as news.

Good journalism, I think, represents life and if you try to organize something too neatly it usually blows up in your face and doesn't really happen the way you want it to.

Journalism is a craft that takes years to learn. It's like golf. You never get it right all the time. It's a game of fewer errors, better facts, and better reporting.

I love to run smart essays and commentary. But it doesn't replace the other kind of reporting.

I was once a journalist. And I think of myself as a journalist, and that's it. You tell the truth. I even wrote a book called 'The Truth'.

I think the most important thing journalism taught me is to mine for details. The details are key. You can't try to be funny or strange or poignant; you have to let the details be funny or strange or poignant for you.

Journalism is always the art of the incomplete. You get bits and pieces.

I mean, journalism is very detailed... you try to get down in the weeds and sort out exactly what happened. And I don't think that a feature film is really a place where that happens.

I think all good reporting is the same thing - the best attainable version of the truth.

Journalists in newspapers and in many magazines are not permitted to be subjective and tell their readers what they think. Journalists have got to follow a very strict formulaic line, and here we come, these non-fiction writers, these former journalists who are using all the techniques that journalists are pretty much not allowed to use.

A journalists's job is not to be balanced. It is to be accurate.

It's about being right and trying to get the facts and get the story right, and inform, you know, the readership or the viewership. And there are some reporters that do that.

I take a certain pride in having maintained a reputation for fast copy throughout my newspaper career. Fast-breaking stories left my typewriter in a hurry. Not great literature, perhaps, but fast, and usually accurate.

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

The most profound lessons about journalism I've learned have been taught to me by the people I've covered.

Anybody who's spent thirteen or fourteen years in print journalism has a lot of stories he thinks were inwardly satisfying as far as preparation, understanding, and diligence.

Journalists who swallow the subject's account whole and publish it are not journalists but publicists.

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

I have found where I am best, and that is being a fact-checker and being fearless.

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.

As a journalist, the details always tell the story.

Great questions make great reporting.