“Journalists who make mistakes get sued for libel; historians who make mistakes get to publish a revised edition.”

When you put a camera in front of me, I’m home.

America is the longest argument in the world.

It’s no longer just reporting the headlines of the day, but trying to put the headlines into some context and to add some perspective into what they mean.

Democracy works when people claim it as their own

We have got to have the ugly facts in order to protect us from the official view of reality. Otherwise, we are squeezed empty and filled with what other people want us to think and feel and experience.

You know what’s the rage this year? …Hats.

There’s 1,000 ways into addiction 1,000 ways out.

David Rockefeller is the most conspicuous representative today of the ruling class, a multinational fraternity of men who shape the global economy and manage the flow of its capital.

The corporate right and the political right declared class warfare on working people a quarter of a century ago and they’ve won.

Hyperbole was to Lyndon Johnson what oxygen is to life.

Our children are being raised by appliances.

Professionals give advice; pilgrims share wisdom.

Barack Obama treated too lightly the people and forces determined to destroy him. They spat in his face and didn’t even get ticketed for a misdemeanor.

If the watchdog doesn’t bark, how do you know there’s a burglar in the basement? And the press is supposed to be a watchdog.

Creativity is piercing the mundane to find the marvelous.

I approach the end of my own long run believing more strongly than ever that the quality of journalism and the quality of democracy are inextricably joined … .

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

I became a journalist because I didn’t want to have to rely on the press for information… I only read it to make sure of whatever everyone else thinks is going on, because it’s useful to know what people think is the news.

Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction. Life is one world, and life seen in the newspapers is another.

As a writer I’m merely a journalist who has learned to write better than others.

All good novelists have bad memories. What you remember comes out as journalism; what you forget goes into the compost of the imagination.

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.

Media is just a word that has come to mean bad journalism.

That’s why we have journalists, for stats.