Michael Hastings Quotes

I expected to go into journalism or law.

When I got a little older, I started writing for the high school newspaper, 'The Maroon Wave,' and that's when I fell in love with journalism.

I love writing traditional magazine pieces, and especially their breadth of reporting and the deliberateness of the writing.

I totally consider Fishbowl my full time job - I have to say I freaking love doing this blog. I just enjoy the medium so much; I love the fact that it requires me to read amazing stuff by hilarious and talented people and forces me to know what's going on in the world.

If I weren't acting, I'd study journalism because I love to write.

I think I'm a reporter's editor. Being a good reporter is a specific skill, one I admire and don't possess myself - I appreciate people who know how to ask the right questions, who are excellent researchers, who know how to assemble information, and I enjoy working with them to shape their information into an article. Good reporters tend to be receptive to editing, and to a more collaborative form of writing in general, and you always end up learning more from how they work than you expect you will.

I love to run smart essays and commentary. But it doesn't replace the other kind of reporting.

I was fortunate that I was at newspapers for eight years, where I wrote at least five or six stories every week. You get used to interviewing lots of different people about a lot of different things. And they aren't things you know about until you do the story.

I feel like, in some ways, I'm just a journalist.

I continue to enjoy looking for stories, and trying to do the best job I can reporting and writing them.

I never saw myself as being ambitious, I saw myself as being in love with the profession. I'm a people person. I love to get to know different kinds of people.

As long as I have my health, I want to be reporting somewhere.

I thought journalism would enable me to be a mile wide and an inch deep.

'Tell me about yourself.' When interviewers ask this, they don't want to hear about everything that has happened in your life; the interviewer's objective is to see how you respond to this vague yet personal question.

I'm a journalist and author. I make my living by finding things out and writing about them.

What I love - and I'm a journalist - and what I love is finding hidden patterns; I love being a data detective.

The great thing about journalism is that there is so much exposure to all kinds of people who can turn up later as characters, whether you intend it or not.

I am a hard-news journalist. That is what I do.

No ideas and the ability to express them - that's a journalist.

I really like the Observer. I think I'd love to have a column with a broad reach that would enable me to do some proper reporting, but keep it on sort of a humorous level. I've always had a very happy experience writing for them.

There are a lot of really good skills you get from doing journalism - it completely changed my world and how I interact with other people.

The first step in good reporting is good snooping.

To me, the newspaper business was a way to learn about life and how things worked in the real world and how people spoke. You learn all the skills - you learn to listen, you learn to take notes - everything you use later as a novelist was valuable training in the newspaper world. But I always wanted to write novels.

I've been leading newsrooms for a while now and it's been an honor serving as Editor in Chief of N.J., but I really think that my best shot at moving the needle in politics is by getting close to it - by reading, reporting, tweeting and writing.

I don't think I ever wanted to be a journalist - I was more interested in what comes from being a journalist.