If a person is not talented enough to be a novelist, not smart enough to be a lawyer, and his hands are too shaky to perform operations, he becomes a journalist.

Journalism is not a profession or a trade. It is a cheap catch-all for fuckoffs and misfits — a false doorway to the backside of life, a filthy piss-ridden little hole nailed off by the building inspector, but just deep enough for a wino to curl up from the sidewalk and masturbate like a chimp in a zoo-cage.

This is one of the many reasons that journalism may be the greatest plague we face today — as the world becomes more and more complicated and our minds are trained for more and more simplification.

"Journalism is "a low trade and a habit worse than heroin, a strange seedy world of misfits and drunkards and failures.

As a journalist, one tends to think there's nothing off limits

What else has a journalist to do these days, after all, but report life's miseries?

I know of no American who starts from a higher level of aspiration than the journalist. . . . He plans to be both an artist and a moralist — a master of lovely words and merchant of sound ideas. He ends, commonly, as the most depressing jackass of his community — that is, if his career goes on to what is called a success.

Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism.

given that many items reported by the “establishment press” turn out to be false, and that the same establishment press misses many important stories altogether, why should we attribute any special status to journalists? Why should we hallow, or expect, journalistic truths?

In almost all other professions a man must be able to observe carefully and report accurately what he has seen. Those qualifications are unnecessary for journalists, however, since their job is to write sensational stories that sell newspapers.

Insecurity cuts deeper and extends more widely than bare unemployment. Fear of loss of work, dread of the oncoming of old age, create anxiety and eat into self-respect in a way that impairs personal dignity.

Because their identity and sense of self-worth are wrapped up in their work, their security is vulnerable to anything that happens to prevent them from continuing in it.

As a matter of fact, our age is no more insecure than any other. Poverty, disease, war, change, and death are nothing new. In the best of times “security” has never been more than temporary and apparent. But it has been possible to make the insecurity of human life supportable by belief in unchanging things beyond the reach of calamity — in God, in man’s immortal soul, and in the government of the universe by eternal laws of right.

"It is the one great weakness of journalism as a picture of our modern existence, that it must be a picture made up entirely of exceptions. We announce on flaring posters that a man has fallen off a scaffolding. We do not announce on flaring posters that a man has not fallen off a scaffolding. Yet this latter fact is fundamentally more exciting, as indicating that that moving tower of terror and mystery, a man, is still abroad upon the earth. That the man has not fallen off a scaffolding is really more sensational; and it is also some thousand times more common. But journalism cannot reasonably be expected thus to insist upon the permanent miracles. Busy editors cannot be expected to put on their posters, "Mr. Wilkinson Still Safe," or "Mr. Jones, of Worthing, Not Dead Yet." They cannot announce the happiness of mankind at all. They cannot describe all the forks that are not stolen, or all the marriages that are not judiciously dissolved. Hence the complex picture they give of life is of necessity fallacious; they can only represent what is unusual. However democratic they may be, they are only concerned with the minority."