Walter Cronkite Quotes

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.

I wasn't the greatest reporter in the world, but I wasn't starting at zero.

I think journalism is useful training for a writer in the way it takes the preciousness out of the pragmatic side of the craft.

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

I think the idea of fact-checking, I think the idea that you come up through a system where you know how to cover night cops, and then you go on, and you go on to various beats, including writing obituaries, and you get names right, you know how to spell them, really has some advantages to it.

I was not very good at newspaper reporting. I'm just not quick enough, and I always tend to tell things as stories.

By writing quickly we are not brought to write well, but by writing well we are brought to write quickly.

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.

No ideas and the ability to express them - that's a journalist.

A.J. Liebling, one of my heroes, used to say that he could write better than anyone who wrote faster, and faster than anyone who could write better. I'm one nine-hundredth as good as Liebling, but that principle may slightly apply.

What I learned at journalism school and at ABC - those skills are the same no matter where you are in the world.

I had rather be called a journalist than an artist.

Journalism: an ability to meet the challenge of filling the space.

News is the first rough draft of history.

Journalism is not an exact science. At best it i a crude art.

I write pretty quickly. Write pretty fast. I was an old press service man. That was part of the necessity of that occupation.

I had discovered journalism to be my life's ambition.

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.

As a reporter, you develop an ear for dialogue because it's your job to capture it accurately.

I have long argued that no one should be allowed to write opinion without spending years as a reporter - nothing like interviewing all four eyewitnesses to an automobile accident and then trying to write an accurate account of what happened.

Journalism is a team sport. Writing novels is golf: it's you and the ball.

Very quickly, I discovered I did not have what it takes to be a good crime reporter: I was too unassertive and a little bit wimpy. It was very clear that was not what I was going to do, but I loved journalism, and I'm the daughter of a film professor, and my mom taught reading.

I don't think much of the journalism that I see.

One of my roles, and one of the things I'm good at, is breaking news.

Getting involved in a newsroom and seeing how it operated and the urgency of live television really got my attention.