Quotes by Journalists - Page 3

Maybe the same essential download was also being delivered to other people—a massive, compassionate battalion of us—at the same time.
Jonathan Talat Phillips
What good is a revolution anyway if it isn’t joyful?
Jonathan Talat Phillips
They built a city of their dreams, with a thriving gift economy and vibrant culture that encouraged all participants to let loose their wildest, most glorious freak. They weren’t protesting; they were celebrating.
Jonathan Talat Phillips
Or perhaps it's "activist," but on environmental and economic problems, without understanding that pressuring women to have too many children is the biggest cause of environmental distress, and economic courses should start with reproduction, not just production.
Gloria Steinem
We are the dead . Our only true life is in the future. We shall take part in it as handfuls of dust and splinters of bone.
George Orwell
A study of the San Francisco Beat enclave by psychiatrist Dr. Francis Rigney in the late 1950's showed 60 percent "were so psychotic or crippled by tensions, anxiety and neurosis as to be nonfunctional in the competitive world." In contrast, the several studies released so far made of the student radicals at Berkeley show them to be stable, serious, and of above-average intelligence. The point is that the Beats had to "cop out" of the Rat Race because they couldn't perform; the New Left chooses to reject a society it could easily be successful in.
Jack Newfield
Protest is when I say I don't like this. Resistance is when I put an end to what I don't like. Protest is when I say I refuse to go along with this anymore. Resistance is when I make sure everybody else stops going along too.
Ulrike Marie Meinhof
It was not the privileged and the fortunate who took in the Jews in France. It was the marginal and damaged, which should remind us that there are real limits to what evil and misfortune can accomplish. If you take away the gift of reading, you create the gift of listening. If you bomb a city, you leave behind death and destruction. But you create a community of remote misses. If you take away a mother or a father, you cause suffering and despair. But one time in ten, out of that despair rises as indomitable force. You see the giant and the shepherd in the Valley of Elah and your eye is drawn to the man with sword and shield and the glittering armor. But so much of what is beautiful and valuable in the world comes from the shepherd, who has more strength and purpose than we ever imagine.
Malcolm Gladwell
... yes I speak a different language - the dark fire of poetry - it flutters and gutters in tune with the mood...
John Geddes
...at seventeen I tried to write poetry confining myself solely to Anglo-Saxon words - don't know if it helped, but it made me more concrete ...
John Geddes
Meredith,' interposed Celia, 'makes one of his women, Emilia in England, say that poetry is like talking on tiptoe; like animals in cages, always going to one end and back again.
Harold Frederic
When you sell a man a book you don’t sell him just 12 ounces of paper and ink and glue—you sell him a whole new life.
Christopher Morley
Verbose is not a synonym for literary.
Constance Hale
An obscure flesh-and-blood Gascon, forgotten by History, transformed into a legendary giant by the novelist's genius
Arturo Pérez-Reverte
If your writing doesn't keep you up at night, it won't keep anyone else up either
James M. Cain
...all these epic battles and monsters lately - but love is a tiny world and I prefer a more personal style...
John Geddes
There are no monsters, Doctor,' she spluttered.Yeah, There are,' he said. 'Some of them are just better at hiding than others. And then there are the ones we wouldn't know if we saw them.
Steve Lyons
It"s easier to believe there's a monster under the bed if you've spent the last six months arguing with a monster.
Chuck Klosterman
I believe we inherit a great river of knowledge, a flow of patterns coming from many sources. The information that comes from deep in the evolutionary past we call genetics. The information passed along from hundreds of years ago we call culture. The information passed along from decades ago we call family, and the information offered months ago we call education. But it is all information that flows through us. The brain is adapted to the river of knowledge and exists only as a creature in that river. Our thoughts are profoundly molded by this long historic flow, and none of us exists, self-made, in isolation from it.
David Brooks
Most commanders wanted as many good sources of information as possible. MacArthur was focused on limiting and controlling his sources of intelligence.
David Halberstam
You have to start with the truth. The truth is the only way that we can get anywhere. Because any decision-making that is based upon lies or ignorance can't lead to a good conclusion.
Julian Assange
The next question is how? How does news find us? What you need is a certain critical literacy about the fact that you are almost always subject to an algorithm. The most powerful thing in your world now is an algorithm about which you know nothing about.
Kelly McBride
The hardest bit of information to extract is the first piece.
Robert Ferrigno
There’s no going back, and there’s no hiding the information. So let everyone have it.
Andrew Kantor
Many of the signals that either stoke or diminish female desire have to do with the female brain's question: Is it safe here?
Naomi Wolf
I remembered some lines from the papers: our nuclear stations are absolutely safe, we could build one on Red Square, they're safer than samovars. They're like stars and we'll "light" the whole earth with them.
Svetlana Alexievich
The fact is that certain themes cannot be celebrated in words, and tyranny is one of them. No one ever wrote a good book in praise of the Inquisition.
George Orwell
The flesh of prose gets its shape and strength from the bones of grammar.
Constance Hale
As Raimbaut dragged a dead man along he thought, ‘Ohcorpse, I have come rushing here only to be dragged along by theheels like you. What is this frenzy that drives me, this mania forbattle and for love, when seen from the place where your staringeyes gaze and your flung-back head knocks over stones? It’s thatI think of, oh corpse, it’s that you make me think of: but does anythingchange? Nothing. No other days exist but these of oursbefore the tomb, both for us the living and for you the dead. Mayit be granted me not to waste them, not to waste anything of whatI am, of what I could be: to do deeds helpful to the Frankish cause:to embrace, to be embraced by, proud Bradamante. I hope youspent your days no worse, oh corpse. Anyway to you the dice have already shown their numbers. For me they are still whirling in thebox. And I love my own disquiet, corpse, not your peace.
Italo Calvino
Rock rock. Back and forth. Lull. Push. Release. Swing back. The stars, the leaves, even the sound of the creek throbbing back and forth. Of a boat. Of a hammock. Of a child's swing. Of a womb. Back and forth. Rock rock. Smell of cold current, of stone, manure, blossom. Sleep.
Peter Heller
Raz was one of those vanguard human beings of indeterminate ethnicity, the magnificent mutts that I hope we are all destined to become given another millennium of intermixing. His skin was a rich pecan color from his dad, who was part African American and part native Hawaiian. His hair, straight and glossy black, and the almond shape of his eyes came from his Japanese grandmother. But their color was the cool blue he'd inherited from his mum, a Swedish windsurfing champion.
Geraldine Brooks
I instantly like people who laugh at my jokes. It's a weakness of mine.
Matthew Norman
Lazy people, the truly lazy people live on information, strategies, ideas, plans and many other criticals, simply to spend one hour of hard work and make the rest feel like a breeze.
Alan Rios
He paused and manufactured a chuckle.
Carl Hiaasen
Cities also believe they are the work of the mind or of chance, but neither the one nor the other suffices to hold up their walls. You take delight not in a city's seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours. or to the question it asks you, forcing you to answer, like Thebes through the mouth of the Sphinx.
Italo Calvino
He realised that in a town a man cannot live as he wishes, but as other people wish.
John Vaillant
I think no matter where you go, you'll be happy as long as you know why you're there.
Rachel Kapelke-Dale
An age-old city is like a pond. With its colours and reflections. Its chills and murk. Its ferment, its sorcery, its hidden life.A city is like a woman, with a woman’s desires and dislikes. Her abandon and restraint. Her reserve - above all, her reserve.To get to the heart of a city, to learn its most subtle secrets, takes infinite tenderness, and patience sometimes to the point of despair. It calls for an artlessly delicate touch, a more or less unconditional love. Over centuries.Time works for those who place themselves beyond time.You’re no true Parisian, you do not know your city, if you haven’t experienced its ghosts. To become imbued with shades of grey, to blend into the drab obscurity of blind spots, to join the clammy crowd that emerges, or seeps, at certain times of day from the metros, railway stations, cinemas or churches, to feel a silent and distant brotherhood with the lonely wanderer, the dreamer in his shy solitude, the crank, the beggar, even the drunk - all this entails a long and difficult apprenticeship, a knowledge of people and places that only years of patient observation can confer.
Jacques Yonnet
In the streets of Cecilia, an illustrious city, I met once a goatherd, driving a tinkling flock along the walls."Man blessed by heaven," he asked me, stopping, "can you tell me the name of the city in which we are?""May the gods accompany you!" I cried. "How can you fail to recognise the illustrious city of Cecilia?""Bear with me," that man answered. "I am a wandering herdsman. Sometimes my goats and I have to pass through cities; but we are unable to distinguish them. Ask me the names of the grazing lands: I know them all, the Meadow between the Cliffs, the Green Slope, the Shadowed Grass. Cities have no name for me: they are places without leaves, separating one pasture from another, and where the goats are frightened at street corners and scatter. The dog and I run to keep the flock together.""I am the opposite of you," I said. "I recognise only cities and cannot distinguish what is outside them. In uninhabited places each stone and each clump of grass mingles, in my eyes, with every stone and clump.
Italo Calvino
But this city is a world of its own, a country within a country. People are used to taking the old and making it news; and used, too, to taking the new and making it old. Every glass of water from its taps, it is said, has passed six times through the kidneys of another, and every scrap of its land has been trodden on, fought over, dug up and broken down for centuries.
Amanda Craig
It is always self-defeating to pretend to the style of a generation younger than your own it simply erases your own experience in history.
Renata Adler
The reason why so few good books are written is that so few people who can write know anything.
Walter Bagehot
Writing is easy: all you do is sit staring at the blank sheet of paper until the drops of blood form on your forehead.
Gene Fowler
The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims one turns as if it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.
George Orwell
I think it's bad to talk about one's present work for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension.
Norman Mailer
How can you write if you can't cry?
Ring Lardner
I am what libraries and librarians have made me with a little assistance from a professor of Greek and a few poets.
B. K. Sandwell
A writer and nothing else: a man alone in a room with the English language trying to get human feelings right.
John K. Hutchens
His (the writer's) standard of fidelity to the truth should be so high that his invention out of his experience should produce a truer account than anything factual can be.
Ernest Hemingway
(Writing) - the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.
Mary Heaton Worse
Journalism allows it's readers to witness history. Fiction gives its readers an opportunity to live it.
John Hersey
A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.
Karl Kraus
The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in shockproof shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it.
Ernest Hemingway
When you're a writer you no longer see things with the freshness of the normal person. There are always two figures that work inside you and if you are at all intelligent you realize that you have lost something. But I think there has always been this dichotomy in a real writer. He wants to be terribly human and he responds emotionally but at the same time there's this cold observer who cannot cry.
Brian Moore
I can write better than anyone who can write faster and I can write faster than anyone who can write better.
A.J. Liebling
The writer must write what he has to say not speak it.
Ernest Hemingway
There is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out.
Joan Didion
To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art.
Albert Camus
Agatha Christie has given more pleasure in bed than any other woman.
Nancy Banks-Smith
A broken heart is what makes life so wonderful five years later when you see the guy in an elevator and he is fat and smoking a cigar and saying "long-time-no-see." If he hadn't broken your heart you couldn't have that glorious feeling of relief!
Phyllis Battelle