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

If you work in either journalism or politics... you will be flogged for being right and flogged for being wrong, and it hurts both ways-but it doesn't hurt as much when you're right.

Have you noticed that life, real honest-to-goodness life, with murders and catastrophes and fabulous inheritances, happens almost exclusively in the newspapers?

A man doesn't amount to something because he has been successful at a third-rate career like journalism. It is evidence, that's all: evidence that if he buckled down and worked hard, he might some day do something really worth doing.

After two years studying what rewrite men did with the facts I phoned them, I knew that journalism was essentially a task of stringing together seamlessly an endless series of cliches.

Reporters thrive on the world's misfortune. For this reason they often take an indecent pleasure in events that dismay the rest of humanity.

Nowhere else can one find so miscellaneous, so various, an amount of knowledge as is contained in a good newspaper.

There was a time when the reader of an unexciting newspaper would remark, "How dull is the world today!" Nowadays he says, "What a dull newspaper!"

At one time he was employed on one of the Yiddish dailies, but lost his job during a political campaign, when he refused to write two editorials advocating the election of two opposing candidates, both to appear in the same issue of the newspaper.

Do not, oh do not indulge such a wild idea that a newspaper might err! If so what have we to trust in this age of sham?