Walter Isaacson Quotes

It really doesn't matter if it happened exactly how I say it happened.

Once we thought, journalists and readers alike, that if we put together enough 'facts' and gave them a fast stir, we would come up with something that, at least by the standards of short-order cooks, could be called the truth.

It is necessary to judge accurately the things that rest on opinion

There are three sides to every story: your side, my side, and the truth.

The facts, even the real ones, must be imagined before they can be stated.

I would be lying if I said the journalism doesn't reflect my own choices as a reporter and a writer: what to say, what to emphasize, how to say it, what is true or untrue.

See, I have no journalism in my background, so I wasn't practised at research or writing non-fiction, nor at handling the truth in a journalistic way. Journalists know when to call a halt and write something, but I kept on looking for answers.

If you are a great news organization, you can't have the best obtainable version of the truth if your vision and your scale is reduced to a fraction of its former self.

It's all storytelling, you know. That's what journalism is all about.

A story begins and it always passes from the subjunctive to the declarative. And Italians don't seem to care about making a fine distinction between that which is speculation and that which is fact.

There are always two or three or four sides to every story.

To a journalist, good news is often not news at all.

All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.

The facts are always less than what really happened.

I do not fear truth. I welcome it. But I wish all of my facts to be in their proper context.

I have yet to meet very many people in the press who are really, truly interested in writing a good story or getting at the truth. Most press people, when they come into an article, have an angle that they want already, so they need points to support that angle, whatever the angle may be.

Tricks you need to transform something which appears fantastic, unbelievable into something plausible, credible, those I learned from journalism. The key is to tell it straight. It is done by reporters and by country folk.

We're always just telling stories, and stories are always just approximations of the truth. It's never the truth exactly.

Understanding is a three-edged sword. Your side, my side, and the truth.

I think it's time for the people and the press, in particular, to be more vigilant about not giving equal weight to lies as they give the truth.

Facts are not the truth. They only indicate where the truth may lie.

The truth is more important than the facts

A journalists's job is not to be balanced. It is to be accurate.

What I want people to consider is that no matter what it is we want to believe, and no matter what story it is we want to jam the world into, the truth is the truth.

There has been far too much of journalists deciding they are on the side of something and going out to get the story, instead of truth seeking which is a different thing.