Diane Sawyer quotes: one of the most recognizable American journalists ever shares her best stuff.
“The most fun is getting paid to learn things.”
“Whatever you want in life, other people are going to want it too. Believe in yourself enough to accept the idea that you have an equal right to it.”
“Do something you really love in the most adventurous place you can and make sure it helps other people.”
“Follow what you are genuinely passionate about and let that guide you to your destination.”
“Don’t let other people tell you who you are.”
“A criticism is just a really bad way of making a request… so just make the request.”
“People tend to vote the present tense, not the subjective.”
“It’s in the preparation – in those dreary pedestrian virtues they taught you in seventh grade and you didn’t believe. It’s making the extra call and caring a lot.”
“The one lesson I have learned is that there is no substitute for paying attention.”
“If you’re curious, you’ll probably be a good journalist because we follow our curiosity like cats.”
“You want to say exactly what you want to say in the tone of voice you want to say it, but you’re not sure you’re in control of your tone of voice sometimes.”
“Competition is easier to accept if you realize it is not an act of oppression or abrasion. I’ve worked with my best friends in direct competition.”
“One day you’re the statue. One day you’re the pigeon.”
“I like talking. I didn’t know at the time I would have to worry so much about my hair.”
“I have a liberal definition of news because I think news can be what excites people. I’m not very sanctimonious about what news is and isn’t.”
“I get involved in the beginning, less in the middle, and very much at the end.”
“I love the early process of asking questions about a story and deciding which questions matter most.”
“Great questions make great reporting.”
“I’m always fascinated by the way memory diffuses fact.”
“I’m not sure people are ever completely comfortable telling pollsters what they do and don’t think.”
“I have a contract but it’s not a commitment in the ordinary sense. It’s our ongoing conversation.”
“Wake up curious, and determined to find an answer.”
“If there were a rehab for curiosity, I’d be in it.”
“That conference? You’re going.”
“Start in a small TV station so you can make all of your embarrassing mistakes early and in front of fewer people!”
“I think I’m the perfect Afghan woman, nobody can spot me, and meanwhile I’m banging my head on posts and walking into walls and falling off of curbs.”
“If you want to be ahead, you have to have even more stamina and even less sleep than long ago – though there wasn’t much sleep then, either.”
“I get to go to work and come home with something interesting or enriching or astonishing.”
“I think there’s a point at which you know how you dress isn’t going to affect how much you do in life.”
“Every time somebody tries to go in and reinvent what we do, it always ends up being more about technology and sets, and flash and dash, forgetting the main thing, which is interesting people saying interesting, important things.”
“[On 9/11] We did exactly what everybody in the country did, watching it. You entered this state of denial. You think, well, it must have been a tragic accident by an amateur pilot. And then you see the next plane coming.”
“I so believe in the fact that we are somehow born to love the truth.”
“The interesting thing is always to see if you can find a fact that will change your mind about something, to test and see if you can.”
“I don’t think it’s about entertainment. I think it’s about being ourselves.”
“Whenever you are blue or lonely or stricken by some humiliating thing you did, the cure and the hope is in caring about other people.”
“I’ve always found a cure for the blues is wandering into something unknown, and resting there, before coming back to whatever weight you were carrying.”
“I read once, which I loved so much, that this great physicist who won a Nobel Prize said that every day when he got home, his dad asked him not what he learned in school but his dad said, ‘Did you ask any great questions today?’ And I always thought, what a beautiful way to educate kids that we’re excited by their questions, not by our answers and whether they can repeat our answers.”
“People assume you can’t be shy and be on television. They’re wrong.”
“A good marriage is a contest of generosity.”
“American Idol, I love. I think it’s a passing fancy but not passing so soon.”
“Part of this new world of completely improvisational terrorism is that there were codes of war that disintegrated in the face of terrorism.”
“Sometimes I forget some of the things I’ve done. I recently recalled that after Watergate I went away by myself to Tahiti for a month, moving from island to island. That was a point in my life where I didn’t know what was next.”
“My dad, I still think, had the most beautiful, simple checklist for what you should do in life: do something you really love that you would do it anyway. Do it in the most adventurous place you can do it. And make sure that it helps other people. And if you feel there’s a genuine need for it, and that, through that need, you can help other people… you’re home.”
“I’ve always wanted to throw a party where everyone comes with their mother’s meatloaf. Everybody could evoke their mother’s memory through her meatloaf.”
“You have to start by changing the story you tell yourself
about getting older. The minute you say to yourself, ‘Time
is everything, and I’m going to make sure that time is used
the way I dream it should be used,’ then you’ve got a whole
different story.”
“Hope changes everything, doesn’t it?”
