Nat Hentoff Quotes
Max Askeli started this very good magazine The Reporter. In fact, Meg Greenfield, who's now the editorial page editor of The Washington Post, was one of the star reporters there.
Quotes to Explore
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I'm a wonderful editor. That's what I do best. I know exactly what I want. If I have to decide whether to wear the red dress or the blue dress or what should I have said, I am constantly changing my mind.
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I'd be far too self-conscious and insecure if I suspected my editor might be a better novelist than I.
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I am a news presenter, a news broadcaster, an anchorman, a managing editor - not a commentator or analyst.
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When I was 21, I wanted to write like Kafka. But, unfortunately for me, I wrote like a script editor for 'The Simpsons' who'd briefly joined a religious cult and then discovered Foucault. Such is life.
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I totally alienated some reporters as I retreated.
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The only people who say worse things about politicians that reporters do are other politicians.
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I wish I could have a little tape-and-loudspeaker arrangement sewn into the binding of this magazine, to be triggered off by the light reflected from the reader's eyes on to this part of the page, and set to bawl out at several bels: MORE WILL MEAN WORSE.
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Rolling Stone magazine would not say anything positive about me, and they were the tastemakers at the time. There were people from the old guard who insisted I wasn't a real rock and roller. Well, O.K., fine -- I'm not a real rock and roller. You got me.
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Book writing is a little different because, in my case, my editor is a year younger than me and basically has the same sensibility as me.
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Being a good writer doesn’t make you a good reporter, it takes hustle.
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With the possible exception of God during the writing of the Bible, every writer in history has needed an editor. So do you.
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Criticizing reporters is like boo-ing at the Special Olympics.
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Clay Felker was then - he had - to his credit, he had created New York Magazine, which was the first of the city magazines that covered the city and gave all kinds of advice and all that sort of stuff. And there were copies all over the country by the time he left. He had, however, a view of journalism that was very much, I must say, like Tina Brown's at The New Yorker. You hit 'em hard, fast, give 'em something to talk about the day after the paper comes out, as contrasted with William Shawn, who gave them something to talk about two or three years from then.
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William Shawn took over The Voice and tried to turn it into New York Magazine - very glitzy covers that promised practically nothing in terms of what was inside, very rushed paper anymore. You - not very contemplative, thoughtful or whatever.
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When Shana Alexander interviewed me for Life magazine in 1952, she gave up after 4,000. At one time or another, I've worked for every studio in Hollywood, for almost every director with most of the actors and actresses.
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Without editors planning assignments and copy editors fixing mistakes, reporters quickly deteriorate into underwear guys writing blogs from their den.
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The smartest people in Washington are the political reporters. They write about their inferiors.
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To entrust to an editor a story over which you have labored and to which your name and reputation are attached can be like sending your daughter off for an evening with Ted Bundy.
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We didn't think much in the air corps of a fellow who wangled a cushy job out of his C.O. by buttering him up. It was hard for me to believe that God thought much of a man who tried to wangle salvation by fulsome flattery. I should have thought the worship most pleasing to him was to do your best according to your lights.
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Only two countries in this hemisphere are not democratic, but many countries in both Central and South America, and in the Caribbean, are really fragile democracies.
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Attempting to build a language wall around Quebec is precisely the wrong policy to follow. It will keep out of Quebec exactly what we need to attract by way of talent and capital; it will drive our best - francophones as well as allophones and anglophones, with their talents and capital - to leave Quebec.
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Max Askeli started this very good magazine The Reporter. In fact, Meg Greenfield, who's now the editorial page editor of The Washington Post, was one of the star reporters there.
