Journalist Quotes

As a journalist, my job is to be dispassionate. Suddenly to be the centre of a story and to be crying, it made me feel very insecure.

Natasha Kaplinsky

Women had been on the verge of taking over the world-the Western world, anyway. Then some sexist pig in Silicon Valley invented the cell phone and women took a sidetrack on which all four billion of them would soon be happily talking to each other twenty-four hours a day, getting nothing else done, and Men Would Be Back.

John Sandford (novelist)

The infectious values and myths transmitted by bad sportswriters may be the deadliest words in the paper.

What makes the goal of accuracy so vexing for chatbots is that they operate probabilistically when choosing the next word in a sentence; they aren't trying to find the light of truth in a murky world.

On the book The Spy Who Came in from the Cold:

The whole plot, from beginning to end, is basically implausible – at any rate to anyone who has any real knowledge of the business.

Every man is his own Pygmalion, and spends his life fashioning himself. And in fashioning himself, for good or ill, he fashions the human race and its future.

Centuries of make-up that can be smudged by emotion have taught women to control their feelings.

Arturo Pérez-Reverte

Love is a fragile, useless thing. It decomposes easily in the tropic heat.

All you have to do is anesthetize the masses by telling them they're an elite, that they've got a mission, that they're making history, that they're fulfilling their destiny and fighting for a better world — and they swallow it like lambs — even when a guttersnipe says it.

Hans Hellmut Kirst

The word patriotism, or its equivalents and derivations, is upon everyone's lips at the present time. It is a magic word which is thought by most people to cover any multitude of sins. To be patriotic in whatever cause is tantamount to being virtuous, while no worse charge can be brought against a man in popular estimation than to say he is unpatriotic.

Ernest Belfort Bax

We know Jesus taught that if someone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to the left. We know that Mohammed was sacked from his village and stoned at Ta'if, but he quietly left for Medina.
If both of these men, beaten, and bloodied-the incarnations of their respective faiths-asked God to forgive their aggressors, then who were today's religious leaders to advocate holy war?

Freedom of the press in Britain means freedom to print such of the proprietor's prejudices as the advertisers don't object to.

It has long been a source of wonder to me why the leading criminological writers--men like Edmund Lester Pearson, H. B. Irving, Filson Young, Canon Brookes, William Bolitho, and Harold Eaton--have not devoted more space to the Greene tragedy; for here, surely, is one of the outstanding murder mysteries of modern times--a case practically unique in the annals of latter-day crime.

God puts mentors in your path. They may not look like you, sound like you, or be what you expect. But they always know more that you.

My four Southern food groups are bourbon, salt, bacon and pie.

In her inestimable audacity, Julia was the catalyst in my life for something beautiful. I hadn't anticipated her-hadn't even wanted her, truthfully-but there she was. A little something extra that made all the difference in the world.

Cathleen Falsani

Well, Foley is responsible for it, and the voters in Florida, I guess, who elected him. Maybe they should have known better.

If there were nothing else, reading would—obviously—be worth living for.

Nuala O'Faolain

Modern English is the Wal-Mart of languages: convenient, huge, hard to avoid, superficially friendly, and devouring all rivals in its eagerness to expand.

The cyborg is now the ideal to which all our most advanced technology is tending.

Bryan Appleyard

Following directly behind the bier were the servants who would, in earlier times, have been slaughtered at the graveside, along with a warrior's horse. Musicians and torchbearers came next, with the rear taken up by the mimes- sinister, silent figures in wax masks modelled on dead members of the family.

Catharine Arnold

When Callas carried a grudge, she planted it, nursed it, fostered it, watered it and watched it grow to sequoia size.

Harold C. Schonberg

It's not about hair, it's about being you—whether that's something the industry has seen before and accepts or not.

A poet may be a good companion, but, so far as I know, he is ever the worst of fathers.

Irving Bacheller

The Iowa caucuses are no more predictive than a gasbag on an ethanol high swaying from a bridge in Madison County.