Daniel Lyons Quotes

I love to run smart essays and commentary. But it doesn't replace the other kind of reporting.

Brilliant opinion. I’m looking forward to reading it.

It's actually harder than it looks to be a good pundit on the air. You've got to have stuff to say.

Writing, for me, is an inherent part of understanding the material on a deeper level.

I don't really think of my essays as being about myself. I know it sounds insane, but I just don't think of them as a memoir. They're essays; they're not an autobiography.

I think punditry serves no purpose.

I want to listen with an open mind, but I don't want to listen with an empty mind.

To write long pieces - or not even long pieces - to write stuff like the columns of Red Smith and people like that - they're different then what it is today. Everything today is based on x's and o's. Inside baseball, it's all, 'Who's gonna win?' or you're comparing things - it's not as thoughtful as it used to be.

I feel like Vertigo is a place to have an adult discussion for adult readers.

Your writings should reflect wise thoughts.

'Guardian' journalism itself will remain what it has always been: thoughtful, progressive, fiercely independent and challenging, and also witty, stylish, and fun.

As a pundit, it's important to tell the viewer something they might not know, be unbiased and not sit on the fence.

The media caters to our TL;DR-afflicted nation with over-simplified, lowest common denominator journalism which completely fails us when the issues are not black-or-white or when the answers require caveats. Nuanced discussions don’t make attention grabbing headlines or dramatic journalistic copy so media reporting disproportionately accentuates extreme perspectives to create the conflict-drama that drives viewers and readership. The resulting rhetoric polarizes rather than convinces.

I think we all ought to be careful about too much generalization on this issue, even as I confess to painting with a pretty broad brush myself!

One has to be realistic. One’s concern for equity and justice in the world must not carry one into the alien territory of unreasoned belief. That’s very important.

When I write, I strain with every wizened fibre of my weathered frame to analyze every possible angle of any given subject.

Readers forget that one can critique yet still admire.

A ginooine statesman should be on his guard, if he must hev beliefs, not to b'lieve 'em too hard.

I think the problem with polemics is that it's general and it's lazy. When you say, "This is bad," that's a general thing. We're more interested in asking the question.

I have a great affection for people who are intellectually engaged with the world, and who don't treat everything superficially. And I think, when people talk about nerdiness, what they're really talking about is smart people who who are trying to think hard about the world. And I don't think that's an insult, I think that's a great thing.

If you can talk brilliantly about a problem

The best way to view a present problem is to give it all you've got, to study it and its nature, to perceive within it the intrinsic interrelationships, to discover the answer to the problem within the problem itself.

Critical thinking does seem a superior sort of thinking because it seems as though the critic is actually going beyond the scope of what is being criticized in order to criticize it. That is only rarely a true assumption because, most often, the critic will seize on some little aspect that he or she understands and tackle only that.

I think that if Essien Udom had something he didn't take it back far enough in history to get at the proper understanding of it.