Reporter Quotes

I can't swing a dead cat without hitting a reporter.

Kids are always asked, What are you going to be when you grow up? I needed an answer. So instead of saying, a fireman, or a policeman, I said, a reporter.

Being a gossip reporter just isn't a respectable job. It'll chew you up and spit you out.

And I realized that there was no sports reporter, so I started covering sporting events.

Covering Richard Nixon's triumphant run in 1968 turned out to be my last major assignment as a general correspondent for CBS News. In September of that year, '60 Minutes' made its debut and I began the best, the most fulfilling job a reporter could imagine.

I had a great editor, Rebecca Corbett, from the time I was a city reporter right through to the years I worked on the 'Sun's' enterprise reporting team.

I was editor of my high school literary magazine and a reporter for the school newspaper.

The reporter is the daily prisoner of clocked facts. On all working days, he is expected to do his best in one swift swipe at each story.

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.

I'm not a reporter but the 'New Yorker' treats everyone like a reporter.

No reporter is flying around in borrowed twin-engine airplanes.

I had - all my life, everybody who knew me thought that I would probably grow up to be a reporter, a newspaper reporter because we didn't have much television in those days.

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.

The reporter claimed he was going to write the article from my point of view. Instead, he made me sound like a little idiot. It made me never want to do another interview again.

I'm a reporter; you can't subpoena people to talk to you. If you write to them and try to call them on the phone and they don't answer or so forth, then take them unawares.

The fact that a man is a newspaper reporter is evidence of some flaw of character.

It's interesting to wake up at 3 in the morning by someone saying they're a reporter and they want to know how you feel. I felt fine, but I said, 'Well, why do you ask?'

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.

Had there been a reporter along with Lieutenant Calley when he massacred those people in Vietnam, I think that probably wouldn't have happened.

I have gone on the air and announced my telephone number at the Washington Post. I go into the night, talking to people, looking for things. The great dreaded thing every reporter lives with is what you don't know. The source you didn't go to. The phone call you didn't return.

When my TV show, 'Sports Jobs with Junior Seau,' assigned me to be a 'Sports Illustrated' reporter for a weekend, I didn't realize I'd have to squeeze it in around another sports job. I had planned to retire from the NFL to enjoy the cushy lifestyle of a full-time reality TV star, but I wound up getting run over by a bull.

I don't think a reporter should give advice or make predictions.

It's always unfortunate when a reporter is sent behind bars for failing to turn over sources. There's no way to say what the long-term outcome will be.

The deadlines are much, much longer with books. When I was a reporter, a lot of times I'd come in at 8:30 a.m., get an assignment right away, interview somebody, turn the story in by 9:30, and have the finished story in the paper that landed on my desk by noon.

The world reacts very strangely to people they see on TV, and I can begin to understand how anchor monsters are made. If you're not careful, you can become used to being treated as though you're special and begin to expect it. For a reporter, that's the kiss of death.

Being a reporter seems a ticket out to the world.

But I'm a humorist. I'm not a reporter, I never pretended to be a reporter.

You can be a great reporter and not be such a great talk show host.

But the reporter has the responsibility to determine, number one, whether that is true, and number two, to make a judgment as to whether it's in the public interest and whether or not it should be part of the debate.

If you write something that gets a bad response, or someone commits candor or is off message, there are often consequences almost immediately when it appears in the paper or a magazine, that somebody gets called into the boss's office. And sometimes it can result in a loss of access for the reporter.