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.
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.
Memory is often less about the truth than about what we want it to be.
One of the things I learned, the easiest of lessons, was that the better you do your job, often going against conventional mores, the less popular you are likely to be.
I have a great faith in the strength and the resilience in the American people.
This was the mark of an uncommon soldier, someone whose courage away from the battlefield was the same as that on it.
The truth posed a great dilemma for a man who always had to be right, and yet, for all his grandeur, was often wrong.
Few sports has as great a disparity between the time committed in practice and time actually spent in game or race conditions.
There are only two kinds of stories in the world: those about which I do not care to write as many as 600 words, and those about which I would like to write many more than 600 words. But there is nothing about which I would like to write exactly 600 words.
These days there’s all too much coverage of pesudo-events about extraordinarily inauthentic people doing inauthentic things.
No publisher in America improved a paper so quickly on so grand a scale, took a paper that was marginal in qualities and brought it to excellence as Otis Chandler did.
There’s a great quote by Julius Irving that went, ‘Being a professional is doing the things you love to do, on the days you don’t feel like doing them.’
Being a professional means doing your job on the days you don’t want to do it.
If there is anything that is important to America, it is that you are not a prisoner of the past.
Fear was the terrible secret of the battlefield and could afflict the brave as well as the timid. Worse it was contagious, and could destroy a unit before a battle even began. Because of that, commanders were first and foremost in the fear suppression business.
Sometimes the best virtue learned on the battlefield is modesty.
What looked safe was not safe. What looked hard and unsafe was probably safer. Anyway, safe was somewhere else in the world.
Always stay in with the outs.
The most dangerous thing about power is to employ it where it is not applicable.
A staff can be no better than the man it serves.