“If an investigative reporter finds out that someone has been robbing the store, that may be ‘gotcha’ journalism, but it’s also good journalism.”

In the perfect world every source could be identified, but like the man said, “It’s not a perfect world.”

More likely to mean the security or the personal happiness of the guy who is telling you something.

National security is a really big problem for journalists, because no journalist worth his salt wants to endanger the national security, but the law talks about anyone who endangers the security of the United States is going to go to jail.

I do worry about how newspapers respond to falling circulation figures. I’m not sure that the answer is for newspapers to try to cater to whatever seems to be the fad of the day.

I never believed that Nixon could fully resurrect himself. And the proof of that was in the obits.

Our best today; better tomorrow.

There will always be leaks; in Washington, everywhere.

The champagne was flowing like the Potomac in flood.

So, here you are, especially in the Pentagon. Some guy tells you something. He says that’s a national security matter. Well, you’re supposed to tremble and get scared and it never, almost never means the security of the national government.

There is nothing like daily journalism! Best damn job in the world!

Hire people smarter than you are and encourage them to bloom.

The biggest difference between Kennedy and Nixon, as far as the press is concerned, is simply this: Jack Kennedy really liked newspaper people and he really enjoyed sparring with journalists.

It changes your life, the pursuit of truth.

Generals who can write always make me nervous.

Maybe some of today’s papers have too many ‘feel-good’ features, but there is a lot of good news out there.

I think he had a strange, passionate devotion to the truth and a horror at what he saw going on.

Each genre has its own process. I’m very intuitive about poetry. I usually write first and second drafts out by hand. The other end of the spectrum is journalism, which is much more cerebral, more thought-out and planned.

And I know that when I worked daily journalism it really affected my patience with literature, which I think requires reflection, and a different kind of engagement.

Needless, heedless, wanton and deliberate injury of the sort inflicted by Life’s picture story is not an essential instrument of responsible journalism.

Conflict, when used as a device, makes for good television and bad journalism.

I want the news delivered unbiased. I thought that was the whole point with journalism.

Journalism is literature in a hurry.

Chris Matthews can’t start any sentence without ‘Let me ask you this… ‘ And I love Chris Matthews! But almost everybody in journalism does it. Who’s stopping you? Just say it!

Fiction is a bridge to the truth that journalism can’t reach.