Karen Abbott Quotes

As a journalist, the details always tell the story.

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.

Tricks you need to transform something which appears fantastic, unbelievable into something plausible, credible, those I learned from journalism. The key is to tell it straight. It is done by reporters and by country folk.

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

A big part of reporting is just being present. You have to show up ten days in a row to get the one telling detail.

Great questions make great reporting.

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

I continue to enjoy looking for stories, and trying to do the best job I can reporting and writing them.

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.

There are a lot of really good skills you get from doing journalism - it completely changed my world and how I interact with other people.

My job as a reporter is not to know what I think.

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.

Being a journalist always makes you a quick study of wherever you're at. You're out all the time and seeing places that normally you wouldn't get to see. It gives you an unusual level of insight into any place.

I'm a reporter by nature and training. I like things that make sense.

I am a writer who happens to use some tools of journalism.

Journalism is not writing.

Journalists like to talk and write and produce, but the most important part of that process is learning how to listen. And that's what makes you a good journalist.

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

For somebody who is a journalist, I can be awfully unobservant sometimes.

I have nothing to do with the selection of stories. I'm the reporter.

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.