Quotes About Newspaper Writing

#1. Our good time is sitting in a coffee shop with a newspaper, writing a line on the back of a napkin. That is the most fun comedians ever have

Jerry Seinfeld

#2. Exaggeration in every sense is as essential to newspaper writing as it is to the writing of plays: for the point is to make as much as possible of every occurrence. So that all newspaper writers are, for the sake of their trade, alarmists: this is their way of making themselves interesting.

Arthur Schopenhauer

#3. In a newspaper, you only have so much room. It teaches you the value of getting to the point, of not pampering yourself with your glorious writing. I've always been much more interested in one powerful sentence that stays with you. That's my style.

Mitch Albom

#4. In London, there is a section in a newspaper, the Metro, where people write in and thank strangers for their lovely or kind actions throughout the week. It brings me such happiness reading it and makes me know that, ultimately, human beings are amazing.

Rosie Fellner

#5. I don't listen to anything when I'm writing. I need total quiet, which is astounding, given that I spent years working for a newspaper and having to write features surrounded by ringing phones and people shouting.

Jane Green

#6. It takes great self-confidence to write a newspaper column. Some might say it takes arrogance. Be that as it may, my willingness to pronounce on a great many matters of which I have little or no knowledge is one of my prime qualifications for this trade.

Russell Baker

#7. In high school, I was very active in extracurricular activities such as art, theatre, and choir. I also wrote for the school newspaper, but not regularly, because I never liked writing non-fiction very much.

Meg Cabot

#8. I don't think there's a difference between writing for a newspaper or magazine and doing a chapter in a book.

Rick Bragg

#9. I have a very long pre-writing process where I'm jotting down ideas in a notebook and ripping out relevant newspaper articles - a long fact-finding mission.

Megan McCafferty

#10. In print news your job is to know things about others, you peer out at the world through an arrow slit. In telepresence you _are known_. If I'd still been writing for a newspaper--if there still were newspapers-- I could have forgotten...

Raphael Carter

#11. For many years I was engaged in journalism, writing articles and chronicles for the daily press without ever joining the staff of any newspaper.

Johannes Vilhelm Jensen

#12. My grandfather had been a newspaper reporter, as was my uncle. They were pretty good writers and so I thought maybe somewhere down the line I would do some writing.

Gene Hackman

#13. I got the writing bug in the fourth grade when a poem of mine was published in the school newspaper. Music criticism came a little later, when I was in high school.

Ann Powers

#14. The one thing a lifetime in the newspaper business teaches you is pace - you spend all your time trying to make sure that the reader's going to finish what you're writing.

Carl Hiaasen

#15. Required to be constantly recumbent I write slowly and with difficulty ... Weakened in body by infirmities and in mind by age, now far gone into my 83rd year, reading one newspaper only and forgetting immediately what I read.

Thomas Jefferson

#16. When I got a little older, I started writing for the high school newspaper, 'The Maroon Wave,' and that's when I fell in love with journalism.

Jeannette Walls

#17. The people I meet in my life as a newspaper columnist are crazy and fascinating - although I love writing fiction some of the stuff that happens you just couldn't make up

Ros Reines

#18. I wasn't always a novelist. I began my writing career as a journalist, working on an afternoon newspaper in Sydney, Australia, doing the crime beat and court reporting. Having grown up in a small country town, I felt as though I had nothing to write about.

Michael Robotham

#19. Rise early. Write. Disappoint your sons. Read the newspaper. Go to bed early. Success.

Arthur Miller

#20. Far more thought and care go into the composition of any prominent ad in a newspaper or magazine than go into the writing of their features and editorials.

Marshall McLuhan

#21. The power of the
journalist is great, but he is entitled neither to respect nor admiration because of
that power unless it is used aright.

Theodore Roosevelt

#22. I love computers. I love writing on them. I love gadgetry. The thing is: I am a slow reader. So, if I am going to get my work done, I read, like, a newspaper and that's it. If I got into websites and the internet, I wouldn't get any work done.

Stephen Sondheim

#23. Of course newspaper sportswriting is mostly terrible - and of course it is usually the best writing in the paper.

Donald Hall

#24. There are stories in everything. I've got some of my best yarns from park benches, lampposts, and newspaper stands.

O. Henry

#25. Try looking at your mind as a wayward puppy that you are trying to paper train. You don't drop-kick a puppy into the neighbor's yard every time it piddles on the floor. You just keep bringing it back to the newspaper.

Anne Lamott

#26. For someone who writes as slowly as I do, each installment is a full day's work. Newspaper novels are painful ... Whether I like what I'm writing or not, whether I'm feeling inspired or not, I have to write an installment every day.

Jun'ichiro Tanizaki

#27. It's like reading a bad newspaper or a bad piece in a magazine.
(on Tom Wolfe)

John Irving

#28. There should be a law that no ordinary newspaper should be allowed to write about art. The harm they do by their foolish and random writing it would be impossible to overestimate - not to the artist, but to the public, blinding them to all but harming the artist not at all.

Oscar Wilde

#29. If I haven't any talent for writing books or newspaper articles, well, then I can always write for myself.

Anne Frank

#30. I'm in a business where there's complete anarchy. You can't control it - you can only react to it. The control that people traditionally had over their message is gone. Look at Wikileaks: you have to approach everything you write on the basis it's going to be on the front page of the newspaper.

Martin Sorrell

#31. Suddenly the whole imagination of writing and editorial and newspaper and all these presumptions about who am I reading this, and who else other people may be, and all that, it's so grimly brutal!

Robert Creeley

#32. Maybe you could be a great writer - maybe even good enough to write a book or articles in a newspaper - but you might not know it until you write that English paper - that English class paper that's assigned to you.

Barack Obama

#33. I don't enjoy writing newspaper articles any more than people like reading them. I'm a standup comic, not a journalist, although sometimes onstage I will say: 'What else is in the news?' Writing is work, which I'm not comfortable with.

Andy Kindler

#34. The newspaper is, in fact, very bad for one's prose style. That's why I gravitated towards feature stories where you get a little more leeway in the writing style.

Tom Wolfe

#35. The infant New York Times boasted that no newspaper printing what was really worth reading ever perished for lack of readers.

Harold Holzer

#36. For I aint, you must know,' said Betty, 'much of a hand at reading writing-hand, though I can read my Bible and most print. And I do love a newspaper. You mightn't think it, but Sloppy is a beautiful reader of a newspaper. He do the Police in different voices.

Charles Dickens

#37. I've been writing since I was sixteen. At first, I wrote mostly short stories and poetry. The first thing I ever had published was a poem about a football game. It was printed in my local newspaper.

Jerry Spinelli

#38. An evangelist is like a newscaster on television or a journalist writing for a newspaper ... except that the evangelist's mission is to tell the Good News that never changes.

Billy Graham

#39. The first writing I did was short short stories for a newspaper syndicate for which I was paid five dollars a piece on publication.

Theodore Sturgeon

#40. The biggest hurdle to writing Fargo Rock City was that I couldn't afford a home computer - I had to get a new job so I could buy a computer. It could all change though. In five years, I could be back at some daily newspaper, which wouldn't be so bad.

Chuck Klosterman

#41. Working on newspapers, you're writing to a certain length, often very brief pieces; you tend to look for easy forms of humor - women can't drive, things like that. That's about the level of a lot of newspaper humor. It becomes a form of laziness.

Tom Wolfe

#42. If you don't hit a newspaper reader between the eyes with your first sentence, there is no need of writing a second one.

Arthur Brisbane

#43. If I had been asked to write 1,200 words for a newspaper tomorrow, on any subject, I would just do it rather than leave a white hole in the page. And I think it's a very healthy attitude to take to writing anything.

Tom Stoppard

#44. I was an English major in college, took a ton of creative writing courses, and was a newspaper reporter for 10 years.

Jennifer Weiner

#45. Something like going to get the newspaper can increase your writing efficiency by taking you away from the material. When I'm doing other things, writing stuff will be swirling around in my head, and sometimes I'll see a new way into the material.

Nathaniel Philbrick

#46. At the beginning of writing fiction, too much of the newspaper style was getting into the prose, so I thought, 'Gee, I should try writing longhand. Maybe I can tap something that goes back to the point before I could type.'

Pete Hamill

#47. Never so long as you live, write a letter to a man - no matter who he is - that you would be ashamed to see in a newspaper above your signature.

Emily Post

#48. I had a job on a newspaper in Wisconsin, and I started off as most reporters did back then: writing obits and free ad giveaways.

Scott Glenn

#49. I had a job right out of college writing for a small newspaper called 'The Unterrified Democrat.' Ghastly, ghastly job.

Cullen Bunn

#50. Write to your newspaper. Call your Member of Congress. Email President Obama. Speak out for a cleaner, more stable future for all of us.

Frances Beinecke

#51. When woman has a newspaper which fear and favor cannot touch, then it will be that she can freely write her own thoughts.

Susan B. Anthony

#52. I'm always writing new books so I don't dwell on the ones I've already done. I think that's a habit from being a newspaper guy because you're always writing columns and you can't reflect on the ones you've already done.

Dave Barry

#53. If an editor can only make people angry enough, they will write half his newspaper for him for nothing.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

#54. I've always been a writer, and in high school, I was the editor of my school newspaper and I got a writing scholarship. It's always been a passion of mine.

Zoe Lister-Jones

#55. I loved writing for the school newspaper. I liked to report and interview people, but I really liked to write columns, funny columns.

Bonnie Jo Campbell