Nigel Rees Quotes

When you take somebody's quote out of context, which happens all the time, nobody's ever going to go and do the research on their own and figure out that you got it wrong.

I never recreate dialogue. I have often been asked by people, 'You must have made this up because this is dialogue, right?' Anything in my books that is in quotes comes from some kind of living historical document: a letter, a memoir, a court transcript, a newspaper interview.

I always tell my fans that are closest to me, if it's not coming from my mouth, my website, or my appointed person, then it's generally not true. Or it's an exaggeration.

Never use 'Politico' for a source for your story.

We need to take a step back and realize that not everything we encounter is true. You don't want to be gullibly accepting everything as true, but you don't want to be cynically rejecting everything as false. You want to take your time to evaluate the information.

The news is notoriously inaccurate, and our memory of it is even worse.

If a journalist comes to you with a great story, one of the first questions you ask is how did you get it. How you got it is relevant to judging its accuracy and preparing yourself for any legal challenge.

I don't take anything that I read in the newspaper at face value on either side - from anybody.

You can't believe everything you hear on the Internet.

Don't believe everything you read in the trades.

I'm more likely to quote the golfer George Burns than the legendary late comedian by the same name who lived to be 100.

If you are a journalist, check and double-check your sources. Don't just swallow what politicians tell you.

The best way is not to read as much from the media and what they write.

In the news feed on your phone, all stories look the same - whether they come from a credible source or not.

Google' is not a synonym for 'research'.

It's human nature to find patterns where there are none and to find skill where luck is a more likely explanation (particularly if you're the lucky manager).

You find actually over the years that you get attributed with a lot of things you didn't do and you don't get reported on a lot of things you did do and I must say, when I read some of these things I wonder where the journalists get them from. They generally speak to somebody who's spoken to somebody who was down the back of a pub who heard the barman say, and gradually finds its way into magazines or articles but no, that's not the case.

Don't be misled by History, or any other unreliable source.

I have so much more compassion for journalists and the work that they have to do, in order to do the jobs that they have to do. I am much more in awe of and am celebratory of great journalism when I see it, and I'm much more critical of bad journalism, or crap masquerading as journalism.

Just because something is typed-whether it is typed on a business card or typed in a newspaper or book-this does not mean that it is true.

I want to set up a new standard: ‘scientific journalism.’ If you publish a paper on DNA, you are required, by all the good biological journals, to submit the data that has informed your research—the idea being that people will replicate it, check it, verify it. So this is something that needs to be done for journalism as well. There is an immediate power imbalance, in that readers are unable to verify what they are being told, and that leads to abuse.

The first thing you ought to do is verify what I present. Just because I say it doesn't make it true. So check it out, see what looks correct, what looks wrong, look at other material which wasn't discussed, figure out what the truth really is. That's what you've got a brain for.

Don't believe something just because you didn't read it in the papers. Wait until you haven't seen it on television.

I'm against the people that make up stories and make up sources. They shouldn't be allowed to use sources unless they use somebody's name.

It is often very illuminating...to ask yourself how you got at the facts on which you base your opinion. Who actually saw, heard, felt, counted, named the thing, about which you have an opinion?