Quotes by Journalists - Page 35

… that sour blend of loneliness and lust for recognition, shyness and extravagance, deep insecurity and self-intoxicated egomania, that drives poets and writers out of their rooms to seek each other out, to rub shoulders with one another, bully, joke, condescend, feel each other, lay a hand on a shoulder or an arm round a waist, to chat and argue with little nudges, to spy a little, sniff out what is cooking in other pots, flatter, disagree, collude, be right, take offence, apologise, make amends, avoid each other, and seek each other’s company again.

Amos Oz

When you're younger you're so happy to get some good loving you convince yourself you're in love, can't live with out it, and chase the dick like a crack addict after the pipe, or chase the bad sex hoping something happened to the man over night and the next time it'll be good.

Jill Nelson

A little government and a little luck are necessary in life, but only a fool trusts either of them.

P.J. O'Rourke

Until now I had been able only to grieve, not mourn. Grief was passive. Grief happened. Mourning, the act of dealing with grief, required attention.

Joan Didion

To celebrate freedom and democracy while forgetting American's origins in a slavery economy is patriotism à la carte.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

If you were lucky, very lucky indeed, there were one or two people in your life who you could tell the unvarnished truth too, shell and egg. And that these people held the essence of you inside them. The rest would be conversations that ended when night fell, or the dinner part ended.

Julia Gregson

It is bound to be a failure, every book is a failure, but I do know with some clarity what kind of book I want to write.

George Orwell

No one has a right to sit down and feel hopeless. There's too much work to do.

Dorothy Day

The orgasm has replaced the Cross as the focus of longing and the image of fulfillment.

Malcolm Muggeridge

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

You’re saying the gods don’t have free will.” “The power to make mistakes,” Penny said. “Only we have that. Mortals.

Lev Grossman

Every woman should see herself looking uniquely breathtaking, in something tailored to celebrate her body, so that she is better able to appreciate her own beauty and better equipped to withstand the ideals of our narrow-waisted, narrow- minded culture.

Susan Jane Gilman

Every day the words that Keep-on-Dancin’ and the Gypsy imparted to me - theories, observations, advice and warnings - are substantiated and acquire deeper meaning.‘It’s not for nothing there are so many bistrots in Paris,’ Keep-on-Dancin’ asserted. ‘The reason so many people are always crowded into them isn’t so much they go there to drink but to meet up, congregate, come together, comfort each other. Yes, comfort each other: people are bored the whole time, and they’re scared, scared of loneliness and boredom. And they all carry around in their heart of hearts their own pet little arch-fear: fear of death, no matter how devil-may-care they might appear to be. They’d do anything to avoid thinking about it. Don’t forget, it’s with that fear all temples and churches were built. So in cities like this, where forty different races mingle together, everyone can always find something to say to each other.

Jacques Yonnet

The toughest bullshit to cut through, is one's own.

Joseph L. Galloway

Contagiousness is an unexpected property of all kinds of things.

Malcolm Gladwell

Well, now you can see how sensible it is not to start your day by guessing what might happen... After all, how long would I have had to go on guessing before I guessed this?

Jonas Jonasson

The intoxication with the theatre, with its limelight, costumes, and masks, and with its passions and conflicts, accords well with the adolescence of a man who was to act his role with an intense sense of the dramatic, and of whose life it might indeed be said that its very shape had the power and pattern of classical tragedy.

Isaac Deutscher

Without courage, our generation is doomed to another decade of political disenfranchisement and shit music.

Laurie Penny

Since science is essentially objective, involving the study of how things actually are, "materialism" would therefore seem to be its antithesis, since its starting point is the desire to impose upon the natural world a particular and limited way of looking at it.

Melanie Phillips

[T]he people who are close to Allah worry so much about wasting time that they call themselves to account for every breath they spend - how many of us wonder about how we spend our day, let alone each breath?

Ethar El-Katatney

Nothing snubs quite like a cat. What evolutionary purpose did it serve, this inherent disdain, this artful blanking?

Will Wiles

Reality is an aspect of property. It must be seized. And investigative journalism is the noble art of seizing reality back from the powerful.

Julian Assange

Howard Hughes was able to afford the luxury of madness, like a man who not only thinks he is Napoleon but hires an army to prove it.

Ted Morgan

The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it.

Ernest Hemingway

The Crazy feeling builds and builds. It never stops, it never ends, there is no relief.

Brian Castner

What is it about the sea? Is it because it’s there?

Jerry Pinto

Real change is slow, hard, and imperceptible.

Lindy West

From the first, Istanbul had given him the impression of a town where, with the night, horror creeps out of the stones. It seemed to him a town the centuries had so drenched in blood and violence that, when daylight went out, the ghosts of its dead were its only population.

Ian Fleming

Their pleasures are fierce and their sleep impenetrable. And they know that the body has a soul in which the soul has no part.

Albert Camus

The thing that strikes me more and more, is the extraordinary viciousness and dishonesty of political controversy in our time. I don’t mean merely that controversies are acrimonious. They ought to be that when they are on serious subjects. I mean that almost nobody seems to feel that an opponent deserves a fair hearing or that the objective truth matters as long as you can score a neat debating point.

George Orwell

He was able to sit in silence for long stretches without feeling a need to make small talk.

Charles R. Cross

Writers of fiction embellish reality almost without knowing it.

Aljean Harmetz

...Baltimore. It's imperfect. Boy, is it imperfect. And there are parts of its past that make you wince. It's not all marble steps and waitresses calling you 'hon,' you know. Racial strife in the sixties, the riots during the Civil War. F. Scott Fitzgerald said it was civilized and gay, rotted and polite. The terms are slightly anachronistic now, but I think he was essentially right.

Laura Lippman

A coal miner from Chongjin whom I met in 2004 in China told me, "People are not stupid. Everybody thinks our own government is to blame for our terrible situation. We all know we think that and we all know that everybody else thinks that. We don't need to talk about it.

Barbara Demick

And that's when I understand that I have been stained. Whether I'm still in love with him, whether he was ever in love with me, and no matter who he's in love with now, Willem changed my life. He showed me how to get lost, and then I showed myself how to get found.

Gayle Forman

When the author admits to Christians that he was not a Christian himself, he says their dialogue became "distant and rehearsed, like a pitch for Ginsu knives.

Kevin Roose

Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, one by one.

Charles Mackay

Courage can't see around corners, but goes around them anyway.

Mignon McLaughlin

He talked about luck and fate and numbers coming up, yet he never ventured a nickel at the casinos because he knew the house had all the percentages. And beneath his pessimism, his bleak conviction that all the machinery was rigged against him, at the bottom of his soul was a faith that he was going to outwit it, that by carefully watching the signs he was going to know when to dodge and be spared. It was fatalism with a loophole, and all you had to do to make it work was never miss a sign. Survival by coordination, as it were. The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but to those who can see it coming and jump aside. Like a frog evading a shillelagh in a midnight marsh.

Hunter S. Thompson

Go ahead and laugh at Detroit. Because you are laughing at yourself.

Charlie LeDuff

There is no experience like having children.’ That’s all. There is no substitute for it. You cannot do it with a friend. You cannot do it with a lover. If you want the experience of having complete responsibility for another human being, and to learn how to love and bond in the deepest way, then you should have children.

Mitch Albom

But he is not always alone. When the long winter nights come on and the wolves follow their meat into the lower valleys, he may be seen running at the head of the pack through the pale moonlight or glimmering borealis, leaping gigantic above his fellows, his great throat a-bellow as he sings a song of the younger world, which is the song of the pack.

Jack London

...but as his father used to say when he had a few drinks taken, you couldn't expect bloody miracles when you were talking about God.

Joseph O'Connor

An author is a person who can never take innocent pleasure in visiting a bookstore again. Say you go in and discover that there are no copies of your book on the shelves. You resent all the other books - I don't care if they are Great Expectations, Life on the Mississippi and the King James Bible that are on the shelves.

Roy Blount Jr.

DO IT NOWIf with pleasure you are viewingany work a man is doing,If you like him or you love him,tell him now;Don’t withhold your approbationtill the parson makes orationAnd he lies with snowy lilies on his brow;No matter how you shout ithe won’t really care about it;He won’t know how many teardrops you have shed;If you think some praise is due himnow’s the time to slip it to him,For he cannot read his tombstone when he’s dead.More than fame and more than moneyis the comment kind and sunnyAnd the hearty, warm approval of a friend.For it gives to life a savor,and it makes you stronger, braver,And it gives you heart and spirit to the end;If he earns your praise – bestow it,if you like him let him know it,Let the words of true encouragement be said;Do not wait till life is overand he’s underneath the clover,For he cannot read his tombstone when he’s dead.

Burton Braley

Every time I hear a political speech or I read those of our leaders, I am horrified at having, for years, heard nothing which sounded human. It is always the same words telling the same lies.

Albert Camus

With no other choices open to us, we'd turned our gaze seaward. The oceans were our America: they reached farther than any prairie, untamed as on the first day of creation. Nobody owned them.

Carsten Jensen

Are you afraid that you're hurting your national auto industry? - Environmental protection isn't a burden. It's innovation. Protecting a backward industry is no way to promote innovation. The government's role is to set standards and then ensure fair competition in the market. You win the market through fair competition.

Chai Jing

In this nonfundamentalist understanding of faith, practice is more important than theory, love more important than law, and mystery is seen as an insight into truth rather than an obstacle. It is the great lie of our time that all religious faith has to be fundamentalist to be valid.

Andrew Sullivan

...a tourist can't help but have a distorted opinion of a place: he meets unrepresentative people, has unrepresentative experiences, and runs around imposing upon the place the fantastic mental pictures he had in his head when he got there.

Michael Lewis

I watched, hoping she wouldn't come out too broke. It's all you can do for people sometimes, no matter how much you love them.

Katie Crouch

Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes: only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal.

George Orwell

Why not go out on a limb? Isn't that where the fruit is?

Frank Scully

Men may or may not be better drivers than women, but they seem to die more often trying to prove that they are.

Tom Vanderbilt

Learn this from me. Holding anger is a poison. It eats you from inside. We think that hating is a weapon that attacks the person who harmed us. But hatred is a curved blade. And the harm we do, we do to ourselves.

Mitch Albom

I realized when you look at your mother, you are looking at the purest love you will ever know.

Mitch Albom

Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you.

Ernest Hemingway

Humans, in the day that has been the Earth, have been here for less than a minute. We’re a late-night piss in the toilet, that’s all we are.

Matt Haig

At 30 a man should know himself like the palm of his hand, know the exact number of his defects and qualities, know how far he can go, foretell his failures - be what he is. And, above all, accept these things.

Albert Camus

The first principle of a civilized state is that the power is legitimate only when it is under contract.

Walter Lippmann

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