Anthony Holden Quotes

Writing is writing, and stories are stories. Perhaps the only true genres are fiction and non-fiction. And even there, who can be sure?

If my name had not been cleared, it would have been difficult, perhaps impossible, to continue as a journalist.

Look, everybody in journalism has a reputation of sorts.

I do, however, feel reasonably strongly the sense that the job of a piece of argumentative scholarly non-fiction is not the same as the job of a piece of fiction.

I'm not very good at creating worlds. I prefer to write about the world as it is.

I thought Bill Bryson's 'A Short History of Nearly Everything' was remarkable. Managing to be entertaining while still delivering all that hard science was a pretty good trick to pull off.

For me writing biographies is impossible, unless they are brief and concise, and these are, I feel, the most eloquent.

I'm a fast writer, and crime novels are easy to do. It's much harder to write a 1,000 word article, where everything has to be 100 per cent correct.

In fact, I spent 25 years as a reporter, swearing I would never become an editor. Sitting at a desk, watching other people go out and find the story, and then fussing with other people's words - I just didn't get the appeal of that.

Before acting, I wanted to become a journalist. I also toyed with the idea of being a chef - but that's only when people asked me what I wanted to be. In fact, I always used to say I wanted to be an actor, but I didn't ever believe that I was good enough to be come one.

I had been working on this series called 'Everything Dies,' and it was basically me doing non-fiction essays, responding to religion and stuff like that, and I really got into this ideas of telling factual stories via comics.

What really destroyed Tucker Carlson, respected magazine journalist, was TV. TV exposed him as glib, smug, and not nearly as clever as he thought he was.

The best way to tell people about climate change is through non-fiction. There's a vast literature of outstanding writing on the subject.

If I'm hip, we've got a problem in this country. I really shouldn't be held up as any model of hipness. If anything, I think I'm sort of old school in my approach to objective reporting and not wearing my opinion on my sleeve. There's a lot of that in American TV news these days. Too much, in fact.

When you write non-fiction, you sit down at your desk with a pile of notebooks, newspaper clippings, and books and you research and put a book together the way you would a jigsaw puzzle.

'Ghost City' was actually one of the few instances of non-fiction that I had written, and I felt that I probably said what I wanted. I think it must be different for every author; I haven't done very much of it, and perhaps, in a way, I found it rather painful, which is why I don't really do it very often.

Most of my stories have some basis in fact.

I was there less than a year before I was assigned to the Paris bureau. I spent two years there and, in fact, before I even went on the staff I was sent to Europe to do assignments which they wouldn't normally do for a young photographer just starting out.

Before Truman Capote, journalism and non-fiction weren't taken very seriously.

Novel writing should never be confused with journalism. Unfortunately, in the case of Primary Colors, a fair number of journalists confused.

In fact Sarah Palin has created more jobs than Obama has. She created eleven jobs fact-checking at the AP just for the Palin autobiography.

I think it's hard to have a full-time job and write fiction, but for essays, you need to be in the world.

When I came back to Washington to be The Times' chief congressional correspondent in 1991, I was looking for a book subject, and Ted Kennedy stood out for two reasons.

In non-fiction, I found John Gardner's two writing books to be tremendously helpful.

In writing non-fiction about people who are living, you are always walking a fine line, carrying a burden to be fair that, in my opinion, should always be there.