If youre a reporter, the easiest thing in the world is to get a story. The hardest thing is to verify. The old sins were about getting something wrong, that was a cardinal sin. The new sin is to be boring.

With the marketing pressures driving the book world today, it's much easier to get the author of a memoir on a television show than a serious novelist.

The byline is a replacement for many other things, not the least of them money. If someone ever does a great psychological profile of journalism as a profession, what will be apparent will be the need for gratification—if not instant, then certainly relatively immediate. Reporters take sustenance from their bylines; they are a reflection of who you are, what you do, and why, to an uncommon degree, you exist. ... A journalist always wonders: If my byline disappears, have I disappeared as well?

If there is anything that is important to America, it is that you are not a prisoner of the past.

These days there's all too much coverage of pesudo-events about extraordinarily inauthentic people doing inauthentic things.

This was the mark of an uncommon soldier, someone whose courage away from the battlefield was the same as that on it.

Being a professional means doing your job on the days you don't want to do it