journalist

Follow your fate, and be satisfied with it, and be glad not to be a second-hand motor salesman, or a yellow-press journalist, pickled in gin and nicotine, or a cripple - or dead.

You need to know the constituency you belong to...and that is revealed by your constituents. When your constituents are speaking in public and making of stories, your constituency can be "journalism".

Journalists are never hungry. They swallow everything.

Oh, I__ Chrissy Mackenzie, I__ from Vancouver but I came here to study environmental journalism,_ the girl exclaimed with way too much enthusiasm. __ou got any advice?___earch me,_ Mandy muttered, spooning another ice cube from the empty glass on the table in front of her. __ like pollution, I write in favor of it, and environmental journalism most often implies that it__ in favor of all that __o green_ hippie crap._ __h, well_._ Chrissy seemed taken aback, offended, and Mandy sighed a fourth time. __amn it, I__ really sorry,_ she apologized, smiling dismally at the aspiring writer. __t__ just been a really lousy day for me and I wasn__ really thinking. My advice? Find your own cause to represent, not one thrown out into society by a ton of environmentalist dopes. Find something new, something you think could be improved, and work from there._ Chrissy smiled with a look of total ecstasy as if the words of some nobody woman were important. Mandy momentarily noticed the groups of laughing, drunk, giggling people, all acting childish_ and for a moment she wished she could be them.

I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours.

Exposing corruption, brandishing truth.

A good businessman must have nose for business the same way a journalist has nose for news. In places where people see a lot of obstacles, I see a lot of opportunities. A good businessman sees where others don__ see.

If feels good to live after death. It feels good to not be dead. It feels so good to find myself alive and flying home. The music plays in my ears and I float further and further away from war. Fucking Baghdad.

I act as a sponge. I soak it up and squeeze it out in ink every two weeks.

Can you remember who you were, before the world told you who you should be?

Like the young Aztec men and women selected for sacrifice, who lived in delightful ease and luxury until the appointed day where their hearts were to be carved from their chests, journalistic subjects know all too well what awaits them when the days of wine and roses _ the days of interviews _ are over. And still they say yes when a journalist calls, and still they are astonished when they see the flash of the knife.

He never asked me what I thought, and I never told him what I thought, because in my view that's the way a journalist ought to behave. You ought not to be going around to people volunteering your feelings. That's daily journalism.

There is much to be said in favor of modern journalism. By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch of the ignorance of the community. By carefully chronicling the current events of contemporary life, it shows us of what very little importance such events really are. By invariably discussing the unnecessary, it makes us understand what things are requisite for culture, and what are not.

The thrill of working in this building, with its iconic globe on top, would never fade.

When I take risks now, I do so only when I have to and with every precaution. I used to prospect for news, dropping into places to see what was up. Well, I could go to parts of Libya today and find lots of good stories, but I probably wouldn__ be around to tell them.

Quit your bitching, if you're not pitching

Unlike other relationships that have a purpose beyond themselves and are clearly delineated as such (dentist-patient, lawyer-client, teacher-student), the writer-subject relationship seems to depend for its life on a kind of fuzziness and murkiness, if not utter covertness, of purpose. If everybody put his cards on the table, the game would be over. The journalist must do his work in a kind of deliberately induced state of moral anarchy.

It's one thing to put on your nation's uniform to give your life for your country. But to dress up in black-market khakis and head into battle in a borrowed bush hat, armed only with a Nikon camera, 10 rolls of film and notebook, is definitely another thing.