David McCandless Quotes

I did some film reviews for small papers in Finland and things like that to be able to keep living here.

As a journalist I'm comfortable doing library research, and I did a lot! I had a fellowship at Radcliff for a year which gave me access to the Harvard system.

I think of myself as a journalist first and foremost.

I think I'm a reporter's editor. Being a good reporter is a specific skill, one I admire and don't possess myself - I appreciate people who know how to ask the right questions, who are excellent researchers, who know how to assemble information, and I enjoy working with them to shape their information into an article. Good reporters tend to be receptive to editing, and to a more collaborative form of writing in general, and you always end up learning more from how they work than you expect you will.

I had been writing for about twelve years. I knew pretty well how you could find things out, but I had never been trained in an academic way how to go about the research.

I thought journalism would enable me to be a mile wide and an inch deep.

I'm a journalist - I'm not Robert Caro. I have a day job, and a pretty consuming one - a joyfully consuming one.

I became a journalist because one didn't have to specialise.

A veteran journalist has never had time to think twice before he writes.

I'm a journalist and author. I make my living by finding things out and writing about them.

Truthfully, without over-egging it, as I often do, the library and journalism, those things made me who I am.

I love writing traditional magazine pieces, and especially their breadth of reporting and the deliberateness of the writing.

The great thing about journalism is that there is so much exposure to all kinds of people who can turn up later as characters, whether you intend it or not.

I am a hard-news journalist. That is what I do.

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

I totally consider Fishbowl my full time job - I have to say I freaking love doing this blog. I just enjoy the medium so much; I love the fact that it requires me to read amazing stuff by hilarious and talented people and forces me to know what's going on in the world.

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.

To me, the newspaper business was a way to learn about life and how things worked in the real world and how people spoke. You learn all the skills - you learn to listen, you learn to take notes - everything you use later as a novelist was valuable training in the newspaper world. But I always wanted to write novels.

I don't think I ever wanted to be a journalist - I was more interested in what comes from being a journalist.

Report, report, report. Dig, dig, dig. Think, think, think. Don't stop being a reporter because you've become a columnist.

I like learning things, and I like that writing comics is an excuse to look into new stuff and research and learn new things and hopefully put them in books.

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.

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

Find out what happened and put it in the paper

I'd been in journalism about two weeks when I realized I would do just about anything to avoid writing, and over the years, I have.