Top 100 Reporter Quotes
#1. It is not the reporter's job to be a patriot or to presume to determine where patriotism lies. His job is to relate the facts.
Walter Cronkite
#2. Personal experience is the surest method by which one can determine the truth of a supposition, no matter how reputable the reporter, since so many experiences are subject to individual proclivities.
Nick Offerman
#3. Three things ruin a man," Harry would tell a reporter long afterward. "Power, money, and women. "I never wanted power," he said. "I never had any money, and the only woman in my life is up at the house right now." On
David McCullough
#5. As a reporter, you develop an ear for dialogue because it's your job to capture it accurately.
Michael Connelly
#6. The old joke is that psychiatrists are doctors who can't stand the sight of blood. Maybe they can't stand it, but if they work where I work, they damn well better get used to it.
At least surgeons and prizefighters get to wear gloves
Mike Bartos
#7. What the military will say to a reporter and what is said behind closed doors are two very different things - especially when it comes to the U.S. military in Africa.
Nick Turse
#8. Every reporter who came up in legacy media can tell you about a come-to-Jesus moment when an editor put them up against a wall and tattooed a message deep into their skull: show respect for the fundamentals of the craft, or you would not soon be part of it.
Mary Karr
#9. I'm an efficient, good, professional reporter. But I also write. And so what I try to do is write about places that I know that I care about intensely and write about them in a way that conveys the fact that I care.
Alma Guillermoprieto
#10. Everything is a narrative in life. I learned that early on as a reporter at the 'Washington Post.'
Kara Swisher
#11. Everybody has a smartphone; everyone is a reporter.
Aaron Schock
#12. Reporter lady: What's that color? John: Hm. I'd call this a color!
John Lennon
#13. I was a finalist for the Pulitzer as a reporter.
Robert Scheer
#14. I remember saying things, but I have no idea what was said. It was generally a friendly conversation. - Associated Press reporter Jack Sullivan, attempting to recount a 3 A.M. exchange we had at a dinner party and inadvertently describing the past ten years of my life.
Chuck Klosterman
#15. She turned back to the reporter, holding out the microphone. I'm not an expert, I'm a survivor. I hope you can learn how to be one yourself.
Rose Wynters
#16. When we make a mistake, it becomes front-page news. We don't need any reporter telling us how badly we played.
Willie Stargell
#17. The artist is not a reporter, but a Great Teacher. It is not his business to depict the world as it is, but as it ought to be.
H.L. Mencken
#18. I was a cub reporter on a local newspaper in Limerick city, and I used to cover the district court meetings. All of life passed through the Limerick courthouse. Misery, malevolence, the dark side of humanity ... I tell ya, it made 'Angela's Ashes' look like 'The Wonderful World of Disney.'
Kevin Barry
#19. Never steal another reporter's story; never take the last of another reporter's ammo; never mess with another reporter's computer. Those are the rules, unless you work for a tabloid, where they replace "never" with "always" ...
Mira Grant
#20. The ability to get on the air, which was crucial to any reporter's career, grew precisely as the ability to analyze diminished.
David Halberstam
#21. A reporter from 'The Times' wanted to arm-wrestle, and as I recall, he kept challenging me. So we went at it, and there was a pop. His arm broke. Very strange. He went into a kind of swoon.
Charles Portis
#22. When a reporter files a piece about Republican that slams Republican or law enforcement or hypes up climate change, there's no attempt to expose their bias, to look at their background. And then when you find out later that they usually have a bias.
Kimberly Guilfoyle
#23. One time a French reporter asked me how I could do a cross so easily. I said, "You just lower your body down until your arms are straight out to the sides, then you stop."
Albert Azaryan
#24. I read rip-and-read news, but I wasn't a reporter. I was reading the wire, and the other thing was, I was reading commercials - and I could do a hell of a commercial.
Mike Wallace
#25. I guess, as a reporter, I always thought that my biggest strength was that I could get anybody to talk to me. I wasn't the best writer, but I could get people to talk to me.
Jose Antonio Vargas
#26. Someone else shoved a pencil in your hand and aimed you in the direction of a burning building somewhere and told you not to come back without a quote from the fire marshall, kid, and that was it: you were a reporter.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#27. To be a good reporter, writing about war, you have to write about the people. It's not about the tanks or the RPGs or military strategy. It's always about the effect war has on civilians, on society, and how it disrupts and destroys lives.
Janine Di Giovanni
#28. For example, I spent a lot of time with Reagan, both before he ran for governor and when he was running for president. As a print reporter without the cameras, I was able to really test the quality of their minds and their knowledge base.
Robert Scheer
#29. I always want to have San Francisco as my home and my base. I'm a business reporter - that's what I do and what I enjoy - and I don't know another place on the planet that would be as fascinating to cover.
Sarah Lacy
#30. Obviously, if the commander makes certain decisions that the reporter thinks is inhibiting his right to report a legitimate story, he has to appeal to the commander's boss to get that changed.
Bob Schieffer
#31. Next time you hear that tone of self-regard, you might like to pick up Dispatches for the New York Tribune and read the only reporter of whom it was ever actually true.
Christopher Hitchens
#32. I think that any reporter or columnist will be a little more careful when doing interviews with me.
Mark Cuban
#33. I am the world's worst reporter. I am apt to try too hard to help rather than just document my subjects.
David Rakoff
#34. As a beat reporter covering the CIA and intelligence world after the terrorist attacks of 2001, I could sense that many things I couldn't see or understand were changing, expanding, getting so big they were difficult to manage.
Dana Priest
#35. An artist is a prophet and seer, not a paint craftsman or design maker, or reporter or entertainer ... the artist has the superiorly searching perception with which that world outside of man's contamination can be penetrated and the truth drawn out from it.
Morris Graves
#36. Reporter Jacob Riis made it his mission to expose the horrors of poverty in New York. New to working with a camera, his flash actually set the walls of One apartment inhabited by five blind people on fire.
H.W. Brands
#37. To capture the human cost of fallen empire with all its horror and absurdity, Sheets offers the right combination: the political insight of a top reporter and the power of a novelist.
Martin Cruz Smith
#38. A reporter started off: "I know a lot of this is kind of speculation." Popovich interupting: "You're going to ask me anyway." Reporter: "And you're going to shoot it down." Popovich replied: "Next question."
Gregg Popovich
#39. NBC's a little jealous of CNN correspondent Wolf Blitzer. They want to get a reporter with a macho-sounding name too, so they're changing Irving R. Levine's name to Scud Shrapnel.
Johnny Carson
#40. I really see the vocation of politics like I see every vocation - whether it's being a reporter or serving in public life or being a plumber - as an extension of ministry.
Kevin Cramer
#41. REPORTER, n. A writer who guesses his way to the truth and dispels it with a tempest of words.
Ambrose Bierce
#42. Being a reporter took me out of myself and that shaped me as a writer.
Tom Barbash
#43. Because I worked as a newspaper reporter for about 14 years before attempting my first novel, I learned to write under almost any circumstances- by candle light, in longhand, in African villages where there was no power, under shelling in Kurdistan.
Geraldine Brooks
#44. I have never pretended to be a great writer. I am totally immodest about being a great reporter and a good news writer. I write fast and I write accurately, nearly as accurately as anybody can be, and that's my skill.
Walter Cronkite
#45. On the day he unveiled the Macintosh, a reporter from Popular Science asked Jobs what type of market research he had done. Jobs responded by scoffing, Did Alexander Graham Bell do any market research before he invented the telephone?
Walter Isaacson
#46. I am not an objective reporter. I prefer to go further, to the unstated things of our existence. What I can't understand and grasp seems to lead me.
Ray Metzker
#47. When Taft gives way to his (anger), one reporter observed, it is to inflict a merciless thrashing upon its victim, for whom thereafter he has no use whatsoever. With Roosevelt is a case of powder and spark; there is a vivid flash and a deafening roar, but when the smoke is blown away, it is the end.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#48. I'm not a politician. I'm not a policy wonk. I was a political reporter, but that's not really what turns me on. What turns me on is how people perceive the issue and how people see people like me.
Jose Antonio Vargas
#49. I thought that was the crown jewel of the reporter's resume - to actually go to jail protecting a source.
Trey Gowdy
#50. Being a reporter is as much a diagnosis as a job description.
Anna Quindlen
#51. 'Amazing Grace' is not a book of interviews or onetime snapshots. It's a memoir of a journey that took me into a place I had never been and took over two years of my life. I don't think the people in this book would have said the things to me that they did if they perceived me as a reporter.
Jonathan Kozol
#52. Report, report, report. Dig, dig, dig. Think, think, think. Don't stop being a reporter because you've become a columnist.
Allan Sloan
#53. It is one of the paradoxes of journalism: The more servile a reporter is toward his sources, the more authoritative he can appear in print.
Andrew Ferguson
#54. He thought I'd be his best reporter, said I had a surprising mind. In my two years on the job I'd consistently fallen short of expectations.
Gillian Flynn
#55. Wherever a man commits a crime, God finds a witness. Every secret crime has its reporter.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#56. The greatest promotion I ever had on a newspaper was when 'The Washington Post' suddenly promoted me from city-side general assignment reporter to Latin American correspondent and sent me off to Cuba. Fidel Castro had just come to power. It was a very exciting assignment, but also very serious.
Tom Wolfe
#57. No reporter of my generation, whatever his genius, ever really rated spats and a walking stick until he had covered both a lynching and a revolution.
H.L. Mencken
#58. If you spend seventy-two hours in a place you've never been, talking to people whose language you don't speak about social, political, and economic complexities you don't understand, and you come back as the world's biggest know-it-all, you're a reporter.
P. J. O'Rourke
#59. A single soldier is nothing to anyone, but a single reporter can change the world." John
Chris Strange
#60. A reporter once asked me if I ever cried. I wonder if people think I'm just as hard as a rock and have no emotions at all.
Diana Ross
#61. When you're a crime reporter, you see the nub of what life's about, and you don't have much patience for the falsity of politics.
Heather Brooke
#62. A Swedish newspaper reporter called and said, You've been awarded the Prize. I was quite sure it was a practical joke.
Joshua Lederberg
#63. In recent weeks, I have heard former Associated Press reporter Ron Fournier on Fox News twice asserting, quite offhandedly, that President George W. Bush 'lied us into war in Iraq.'
Laurence Silberman
#64. I read a lot of history, biographies, science, and novels,' he says, ushering a reporter out the door with a hint of relief. 'I do not read management or economics.'
(from an interview in the Christian Science Monitor, July 26, 1993)
Peter F. Drucker
#65. I worked in three local news markets and in every single one of them, they said: 'You're a lousy anchor. We would love to renew your contract and have you be our lead reporter here, but we're not going to have you anchor.'
Elizabeth Vargas
#66. I think of myself as a kind of reporter; I report on the nature of certain events. I think of art as a report on civilization at a certain time.
Leon Golub
#67. I had pictured journalism as I'd seen it in the most ennobling films, where the reporter battles for the truth, propelled by conviction, and is triumphant. There are journalists who fit that ideal.
Tom Rachman
#68. Yeah, says the Newsday reporter, he's a real pacifist. He's the Gandhi of Gangsters.
J.R. Moehringer
#69. I hate cops. You're either a cop or a reporter. And I hate cops and newspapermen.
James Kaplan
#70. My job as a television anchor or television reporter is not to proselytize.
Deborah Norville
#71. I'm still an old-school reporter at heart. Writing fiction satisfies my journalistic need to hear and relay the testimony of everyday people at the center of events.
Karen Traviss
#72. Am I perfect? No. Do I want to be perfect? No, because if I were perfect, I would be a reporter.
Paul LePage
#73. It is not a camera, or a reporter that makes something real and genuine; more often a camera or a reporter does the opposite.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#74. Michelle Tafoya - best NFL sideline reporter - period. She is always prepared and professional.
Megan Alexander
#75. I would never have been a good reporter because I am not accurate regarding facts.
George Akerlof
#76. I had been a reporter for 15 years when I set out to write my first novel. I knew how to research an article or profile a subject - skills that I assumed would be useless when it came to fiction. It was from my imagination that the characters in my story would emerge.
Amy Waldman
#77. [Donald Trump] was a magnificent witness. The reporter, when asking me about his testimony, said, "Sessions gushed about his testimony." But it was remarkable.
Jeff Sessions
#78. My employer was never at any time aware of anything in my past beyond the writing I did, because, frankly, it isn't relevant to the job I was asked to do, which was to be a reporter.
Jeff Gannon
#79. I was editor of my high school literary magazine and a reporter for the school newspaper.
Jeffery Deaver
#80. From the point of view of literature Mr. Kipling is a genius who drops his aspirates. From the point of view of life, he is a reporter who knows vulgarity better than any one has ever known it.
Oscar Wilde
#81. It wasn't a direct route. I began as a freelance reporter. That's an important distinction, because people who rise through the ranks of The New York Times become vetted, conditioned, harassed, and shaped by the institution. That never happened to me.
Chris Hedges
#82. The archives recall not one single incriminating incident, not one drunken escapade, not one reported affair, not one spat with a team-mate or reporter - As Matthew Parris wondered of Barack Obama in these pages recently, is he human?
Michael Atherton
#83. As a young man, Dickens worked as a reporter in the House of Commons and hated it. He felt that all politicians spoke with the same voice.
Claire Tomalin
#84. And there are two types of stories. One type is one's own story. The other type is telling the stories of others. Thanks to this genre, writers of nonfiction can now use the tools of the reporter, the points of view and ear for dialog of a novelist, and the passion and wordplay of the poet.
Lee Gutkind
#85. Having been aware of the Red Sox since the 1946 World Series, having been growled at by Ted Williams as a young reporter in 1960, having been present at the horror of 1986 and the comeback of 2004, I have seen the highs and lows of some other people's favorite team.
George Vecsey
#86. The news media in general are liberal. If you want to be a reporter, you are going to see poverty and misery, and you have to be involved in the human condition.
Barbara Walters
#87. He still had the problem with getting the album finished. Now was definitely not the time to be messing around with a reporter or a woman. And now he had both those things rolled into one glorious package. He just hoped he survived them both.
Samantha Chase
#88. If I had my choice I would kill every reporter in the world, but I am sure we would be getting reports from Hell before breakfast.
William Tecumseh Sherman
#89. Will some reporter, or some Republican on the Sunday shows, please ask why tax cuts raid the non-existent Social Security Trust Fund but all the Democrats' new spending doesn't? Will someone please ask that?
Rush Limbaugh
#90. President Bush got a little upset with a reporter for calling him 'sir' instead of 'Mr. President.' Man, how upset is he going to be after the election when they start calling him George again?
Jay Leno
#91. "It all came from there," Lech Walesa said, pointing to a TV when a reporter asked him why communism fell.
Lech Walesa
#92. I've been to livelier funerals," grumbled Herb.
Leslie Meier
#93. At one point during the Holmes investigation Chicago's chief of police told a Tribune reporter he'd just as soon have a squad of reporters under his command as detectives.
Erik Larson
#94. A reporter is always concerned with tomorrow. There's nothing tangible of yesterday. All I can say I've done is agitate the air ten or fifteen minutes and then boom - it's gone.
Edward R. Murrow
#95. If you spend 72 hours in a place you've never been, talking to people whose language you don't speak about social, political, and economic complexities you don't understand, and you come back as the world's biggest know-it-all, you're a reporter. Either that or you're President Obama.
P. J. O'Rourke
#96. I wore a lot of vintage clothing. I dressed like a reporter, with a little card in my hat. I had these fantasies of who I wanted to be, so I'd dress like an explorer, a cowboy. I dressed up like Elton John a lot too. That was another period.
Illeana Douglas
#97. I have nothing to do with the selection of stories. I'm the reporter.
Kate Adie
#98. After nine or 10 years of being interviewed, you start wanting to team up with the reporter and get the job done.
John Travolta
#99. As a cub reporter, I devoured books about journalism.
Lionel Barber
#100. Ben m'boy," Jubal said gently, "as a reporter you are hard-working and sometimes readable.
Robert A. Heinlein
