I spent my 20s making film after film, often in very adverse conditions. You'd fly back from somewhere - Beirut, the Falklands, South Africa - on Saturday, and you'd have 24 hours to cut your film, and it would go out on Monday night.
Working as a journalist is exactly like being a wallflower at an orgy.
Journalists do not live by words alone, although sometimes they have to eat them.
The plain truth is that the reporter's trade is for young men. Your feet, which do the legwork, are nine times more important than your head, which fits the facts into a coherent pattern.
I respect and empathize with reporters and editors who must compete in today's environment. And I know full well that when I've been covering campaigns, which I still do, I've made my mistakes and have been far from perfect.
Never joke with the press. Irony does not translate into newsprint.
If you take the more general role of going to local stations around the country in Montana or South Carolina or wherever, and start in the local news, it's a lot more difficult to get to the stories that you want to really cover.
Advertisers don't want to put their ads next to the investigative story; it's extremely difficult to do that. And very few people today actually read those serious news stories on the Web now.
Journalists are accused of being lapdogs when they don't ask the hard questions, but then accused of being rude when they do. Good thing we have tough hides.
I never did any training in journalism or in finance, so I really was in the deep end. I got very good at going to press conferences and nodding. I'd figure it out when I got back to the office. Charts and numbers. I've never been great with facts, ever, my whole life. For a journalist, that's not a very good trait.
Gathering news in Russia was like mining coal with a hat pin.
One of the problems that we have as American journalists is that we bring the American cultural baggage with us and we plop it down and it follows us around and that's just a fact of life.
I couldn't find any way to tell the truth in a regular newspaper.
In a hyper-capitalist environment dominated by media giants, the means available to independent journalism have narrowed considerably.
You can't expect that because you find a story and report it out that your newspaper and broadcasting company is going to want to publish and broadcast it - and you're going to be a hero.
I much preferred the peaceful life on the road, where I didn't have to ask embarrassing questions and do all the things real reporters have to do.
Journalists are in the same madly rocking boat as diplomats and statesmen. Like them, when the Cold War ended, they looked for a new world order and found a new world disorder. If making and conducting foreign policy in today's turbulent environment is difficult, so is practicing journalism.
I studied journalism and was idealistic as a student. In course of time, I learnt that there's a lot of politics, and it's not easy to put forth your point of view as an investigative journalist.
I think if you look at the failure of journalism in the modern age, then I don't want to be called a journalist.
It used to be that a journalist covering the White House had trouble getting news because each person there worked for the same person, while in Congress they are all independent contractors and you could get news. But today, the White House Staff are all independent contractors and that is a great place to get news.
I have never lived through any time in my career when there haven't been grave challenges facing newspapers.
I find having a column a very difficult form of journalism. I'm not a natural like Tom Friedman and Anna Quindlen.
Political cartoonists are an endangered species. Their habitat is rapidly disappearing
I would give back every single award to be able to actually do our jobs as journalists without this kind of harassment.
I don't think that my kind of journalism has ever been universally popular. It's lonely out here.
