David Halberstam Quotes (19 Quotes)

There would be a very nice small book in it about another time and era in America, a kind of sweetness and friendship,

If you're 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.

We had absolute military superiority but they had absolute political supremacy. That led to a stalemate - and that became the governing issue.

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.

I think what we tried to do is get a reflection of all the forces that are at play, of the best writing. In the end, we ended up with something that was a pretty good reflection of the changes in society as well.

I am made nervous, as someone who works in the same vineyard, by the idea of inventing himself as a fictional character, ... It seems unnecessary. It seems taking a major liberty. And the problem with it is if you invent the fictional character and you take this liberty, then the reader is going to think what other liberties

I think they were watching the movie 'Patton' when they should have been watching 'The Battle of Algiers' about urban insurgency. I'm a Vietnam-era journalist. I think most journalists were appalled as we moved toward war in Iraq. The worst mistake this administration made was not about weapons of mass destruction. It was the administration's view that we'd be welcomed as the great liberator.

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.

This award is very special because it recognizes what I think of as members of the infantry -- reporters who do the heavy lifting, even though they don't personally have the high public profile that some journalists in print and broadcast media attain. Their commitment to reporting difficult stories over the long haul, often against the conventional grain, is a tremendous public service, and the example of endurance and honor that they bring to the profession is a reminder of what journalism is about at its best.

They understood who they were individually and they understood who they were as a couple. They were marvelously locked in together. For my wife and myself, among the most cherished times were the four-person dinners, because you got these extraordinary intellectuals who were enormously respectful of each other.

It was the first time in American history a war had been declared over by an anchorman.

Memory is often less about the truth than about what we want it to be.

I think I got very lucky on this, ... The Red Sox players of that team just were particularly pleasant. Ted Williams was larger than life and exuberant and contentious and cantankerous, but great fun to be with.

I think he was such a magical figure, so compelling a figure, he inevitably drew the interest of very talented writers.

Nixon, who spent much of his career attacking the press and saying he was a victim of the press, was in fact created by the press, in this case the L.A. Times.

I have no doubt he would have been a huge success no matter what he put his mind to,

The Best American Sports Writing of the Century.

Late in his career, when the L.A. Times started pursuing him in its new incarnation during Watergate, it was one of the great 360-degree turnarounds.

I read that piece and thought, 'I'm getting out of here,' ... I'm getting out of daily journalism because this is a level way above what I and everybody I know has been doing, and I want to try to do something like this. It's a very influential piece.