Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefe...nsible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The dominant and most deep-dyed trait of the journalist is his timorousness. Where the novelist fearlessly plunges into the water ...of self-exposure, the journalist stands trembling on the shore in his beach robe.... The journalist confines himself to the clean, gentlemanly work of exposing the griefs and shames of others.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I well recall my horror when I heard for the first time, of a journalist who had laid in a pair of what were then called bicycle p...ants and taken to golf; it was as if I had encountered a studhorse with his hair done up in frizzes, and pink bowknots peeking out of them. It seemed, in some vague way, ignominious, and even a bit indelicate.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I am a journalist and, under the modern journalist's code of Olympian objectivity (and total purity of motive), I am absolved of r...esponsibility. We journalists don't have to step on roaches. All we have to do is turn on the kitchen light and watch the critters scurry.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Gonzo journalism ... is a style of "reporting" based on William Faulkner's idea that the best fiction is far more true than any ki...nd of journalism--and the best journalists have always known this.... True gonzo reporting needs the talents of a master journalist, the eye of an artist/photographer and the heavy balls of an actor. Because the writer must be a participant in the scene, while he's writing it--or at least taping it, or even sketching it. Or all three. Probably the closest analogy to the ideal would be a film director/producer who writes his own scripts, does his own camera work and somehow manages to film himself in action, as the protagonist or at least a main character.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
This surface good-nature which captivates a new acquaintance and is no bar to treachery, which knows no scruple and is never at fa...ult for an excuse, which makes an outcry at the wound which it condones, is one of the most distinctive features of the journalist. This camaraderie (the word is a stroke of genius) corrodes the noblest minds; it eats into their pride like rust, kills the germ of great deeds, and lends a sanction to moral cowardice.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It has only just begun to dawn on us that in our own language alone, not to speak of its many companions, the past history of huma...nity is spread out in an imperishable map, just as the history of the mineral earth lies embedded in the layers of its outer crust. But there is this difference between the record of the rocks and the secrets which are hidden in language: whereas the former can only give us knowledge of outward dead things--such as forgotten seas and the bodily shapes of prehistoric animals--language has preserved for us the inner living history of man's soul. It reveals the evolution of consciousness.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The French Revolution gave birth to no artists but only to a great journalist, Desmoulins, and to an under-the-counter writer, Sad...e. The only poet of the times was the guillotine.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I review novels to make money, because it is easier for a sluggard to write an article a fortnight than a book a year, because the... writer is soothed by the opiate of action, the crank by posing as a good journalist, and having an airhole. I dislike it. I do it and I am always resolving to give it up.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »