Jenny

“But, if I was never complete, I never exaggerated. Every one of those articles was an understatement, especially where the conditions were bad, and the proof thereof is that while each article seemed to astonish other cities, it disappointed the city which was its subject.... I cut twenty thousand words out of the Philadelphia article and yet I had not written half my facts. I know a man who is making a history of the corrupt construction of the Philadelphia City Hall, in three volumes, and he grieves because he lacks space. You can’t put all the known incidents of the corruption of an American city into a book.

This is all very unscientific, but then, I am not a scientist. I am a journalist. I did not gather with indifference all the facts and arrange them patiently for permanent preservation and laboratory analysis. I did not want to preserve, I wanted to destroy the facts.”
― Lincoln Steffens, The Shame Of The Cities

“And because she carried with her, always, that most vital lesson: first, listen. Judith understood that this is how you free yourself. That this is how we free one another. She understood that it was never, really, about her at all.”
― Sara B. Franklin, The Editor: How Publishing Legend Judith Jones Shaped Culture in America

“I learned to write fiction the way I learned to read fiction - by skipping the parts that bored me.
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― Jonathan Lethem

“I want that on a T-shirt: Fran Lebowitz thinks about me every day”
― Salman Rushdie, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder