Write quickly and you will never write well; write well, and you will soon write quickly.
Your direction is more important than your speed.
It never really mattered to me trying to get somewhere fast because if you get somewhere fast, you probably won't stay there too long.
A.J. Liebling, one of my heroes, used to say that he could write better than anyone who wrote faster, and faster than anyone who could write better. I'm one nine-hundredth as good as Liebling, but that principle may slightly apply.
From writing rapidly it does not result that one writes well, but from writing well it results that one writes rapidly.
It's counterintuitive to take a long time to hire someone, but it will save you enormous amounts of time and money later. Our biggest mistakes in hiring stem from speed.
The pressures to get the story first, if wrong, are greater sometimes than the pressures to get the story right, if late.
Ten years from now, no one is going to care how quickly the books came out. The only thing that will matter, the only thing anyone will remember, is how good they were. That's my main concern, and always will be.
The greatest felony in the news business today is to be behind, or to miss a big story. So speed and quantity substitute for thoroughness and quality, for accuracy and context.
Nobody wants to be against technology, but I think that regulators should not - and people should not - assume that faster is always better in markets. We need to question technology to insure that markets continue to perform their fundamental purposes.
