“The man must have a rare recipe for melancholy, who can be dull in Fleet Street.”
“Europe has a press that stresses opinions; America a press, radio, and television that emphasize news.”
“I still believe that if your aim is to change the world, journalism is a more immediate short-term weapon.”
“In America journalism is apt to be regarded as an extension of history: in Britain, as an extension of conversation.”
“I see journalists as the manual workers, the laborers of the word. Journalism can only be literature when it is passionate.”
“You cannot hope to bribe or twist (thank God!) the British journalist. But, seeing what the man will do unbribed, there's no occasion to.”
“Personal columnists are jackals and no jackal has been known to live on grass once he had learned about meat -- no matter who killed the meat for him.”
“A petty reason perhaps why novelists more and more try to keep a distance from journalists is that novelists are trying to write the truth and journalists are trying to write fiction.”
“The journalists have constructed for themselves a little wooden chapel, which they also call the Temple of Fame, in which they put up and take down portraits all day long and make such a hammering you can't hear yourself speak.”
“The lowest form of popular culture -- lack of information, misinformation, misinformation, and a contempt for the truth or the reality of most people's lives -- has overrun real journalism. Today, ordinary Americans are being stuffed with garbage.”
“It was a fatal day when the public discovered that the pen is mightier than the paving-stone, and can be made as offensive as the brickbat. They at once sought for the journalist, found him, developed him, and made him their industrious and well-paid servant. It is greatly to be regretted, for both their sakes.”
“Evidently there are plenty of people in journalism who have neither got what they liked nor quite grown to like what they get. They write pieces they do not much enjoy writing, for papers they totally despise, and the sad process ends by ruining their style and disintegrating their personality, two developments which in a writer cannot be separate, since his personality and style must progress or deteriorate together, like a married couple in a country where death is the only permissible divorce.”
“The real news is bad news.”
“Bad manners make a journalist.”
“Journalism is literature in a hurry.”
“Journalism is the entertainment business.”
“Every journalist owes tribute to the evil one.”
“The press is like the air, a chartered libertine.”
“Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one.”
“A journalist is a person who has mistaken their calling.”
“I find I journalize too tediously. Let me try to abbreviate.”
“Write the news as if your very life depended on it. It does!”
“Journalism could be described as turning one's enemies into money.”
“Journalists are like dogs, when ever anything moves they begin to bark.”
“The facts fairly and honestly presented; truth will take care of itself.”
“Journalism will kill you, but it will keep you alive while you're at it.”
“If you can't get a job as a pianist in a brothel you become a royal reporter.”
“A professional whose job it is to explain to others what it personally does not understand.”
“If the reporter has killed our imagination with his truth, he threatens our life with his lies.”
“Now he is a statesman, when what he really wants is to be what most reporters are, adult delinquents.”