David Grann 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.

I started as a print reporter.

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

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.

I always wanted to use my newspaper background in a novel.

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.

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.

Journalism: A profession whose business is to explain to others what it personally does not understand.

I didn't care for beat reporting, covering the same thing day after day - short attention span.

When I'm anchoring, I miss chasing stories in the field.

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

Newspaper reporting is really storytelling. We call our articles 'stories,' and we try to tell them in a way that even people who don't know all the background can understand them.

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

I had - all my life, everybody who knew me thought that I would probably grow up to be a reporter, a newspaper reporter because we didn't have much television in those days.

Well I just always wanted to be a newspaper reporter.

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'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.

I had never been out covering a story, but boy, was that fun.

The big moment for me was making 'All the President's Men'. It was not about Watergate or President Nixon. I wanted to focus on something I thought not many people knew about: How do journalists get the story?

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.

I'd been involved in journalism for a long time - my dad's a journalist, he's written many books, and when I was twelve years old I wrote reports on local football matches for the newspapers.