Anderson Cooper Quotes

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

Whether it's standing backstage with Jennifer Lopez in a dress that I know everyone will be talking about tomorrow... or being there when incredible news breaks, and instead where people sit in front of their TVs and look at it, I'm the person who goes there to bring you the story... It's amazing. It's unbelievable.

Journalism is literature in a hurry.

My own career started in New York at the 'Associated Press', a fast-paced news agency where we rarely had time for deep reporting.

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

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

Journalism is in fact history on the run.

We are in the business of gathering the news. We're not in the business of talking about the news.

When you find yourself on a pageant stage, there are a lot of unpredictable moments, and I think a lot of that translates to doing the live, breaking-news reporting that I do now.

Just ask my boss - any time a major story breaks, I'm banging on his door to send me.

Journalism is about bringing people to an event or something that they couldn't attend.

Obviously I love doing newsmaker interviews, and if I can contribute in any way to that, I would love to. I love reporting, getting out in the field and talking to people about various issues.

Journalism is nine-tenths being in the right places at the right time.

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.

CNN is not and never will abandon our first and fundamental brand equity, which is news and breaking news.

When I was at a newspaper, I knew what an opportunity that was, and I religiously protected my time on the cop beat.

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.

If there is anything good to be said about my particular line of work, it's that we get to tell people the news they need to hear, and to put it in context. To get to that - for one hour every night on the 'PBS NewsHour,' and for an additional half-hour every Friday night on 'Washington Week,' we have to slog through a lot of tough stuff.

The news business is simple, but it's not easy to do well.

I'm a news junkie. I generally ad lib it. I find a story I want to key off on, open the mic, drag it in the Dropbox, and they pull it out the next morning.

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

Give news a little more time, and don't request that they also, in their news time, entertain. We're not entertainers. We're journalists. And we need more time to do our job well.

I often say that the best way to find a story is a one-inch brief in a local newspaper.

Helping set the day's agenda and deciding what we used and editing it, that was a journalistic high point. I liked reporting as well. Just doing the news - the live performance - wasn't important. Working on the desk was.

I came up in this industry at a time where you had to be a journalist. You had to break stories. You had to break news to elevate your career, to get to a certain point and a certain level in this business, before you even had the license to give your opinion, especially if you were a black man.