A Quote by Matt Taibbi

Everybody I knew, practically, was a journalist when I was a kid - my father, all of his friends. I never wanted to be like those people. — © Matt Taibbi
Everybody I knew, practically, was a journalist when I was a kid - my father, all of his friends. I never wanted to be like those people.
As a kid, in the Runaways, I would see the interviewers start to ask about our personal lives and what we did — and I could see the look in their eyes. They were practically frothing at the mouth. So if I answered these questions, I knew they were never gonna talk about the music. It was like that instinct — don’t go there, man. Have boundaries. Have mystery. You don’t have to let everybody in! I want to be singing to everybody, and I want everybody to think that I’m singing to them. Guys, girls and everyone in between.
At 15 [my father] revolted against his father like any teenager, and said, "I'm out of here! What are you doing to me?" He thought he wouldn't be involved in that kind of stuff for the rest of his life. He just wanted to make money. He was one of those people who took over the family responsibility. His own father was pretty irresponsible with money and borrowed from people all the time.
The one thing that shaped my life was when I was 15 or 16: I knew I wanted to be a journalist. And not just a journalist, but a journalist in the Middle East, and to go back to the Arab world and try to understand what it meant to be Lebanese.
I think we're all actors. There's this friend of mine who's a great drummer, and he said, "I never thought I'd be a drummer, but I got really good at it. I always feel like I'm an actor playing the drums." His real calling was that he was going to be a magician. That's what he felt like he wanted to do. If you decide to act like a journalist, you'll probably be a better journalist than just being a journalist. What you're doing is, you're taking the executive role and stepping outside yourself so that you're able to make more objective decisions.
When [my father] reached his majority, he was the head of the family. Everybody depended upon him. He went into a very uptight appearance; he would wear Chesterfield coats to work, Homburg hats, really getting into the whole thing. He knew people like Oscar Levant. He loved New York. He wanted to live there.
I used to watch my father play the guitar and sing when I was a little boy. By the time I was 11, I knew what I wanted to do. My father really couldn't afford to spend $12 for a guitar for me, but he did. It was like an ordinary family spending $500 for a kid's gift.
You never know how your work is going to be received, and to have it be not just received by the people who wanted it or knew about it or our traditional fan base, which is pretty big, but also having it spill over to everybody who plays games, and then those people telling everybody else who doesn't play games - that's what it became.
I had that laser focus, identified what I wanted when I was a kid, and never let anything get in my way. If you look on paper at who I am and what I sound like, and what I look like, you wouldn't say, 'Go into broadcasting.' It's just what I wanted to do - I knew that I could do it, and I never let anyone tell me that I couldn't.
Every kid I knew had a father with a little stash of men's magazines which the father thought was secret and which the kid knew all about.
Can you imagine Simon as a kid? His imaginary friends probably never wanted to play with him.
My parents weren't involved in show business, but my parents would show me. We'd watch old films in the house. Little film festivals of Westerns and stuff like that when I was a kid. I knew I wanted to be those guys in those movies before I knew what being an actor was.
When the mortgage giant Fannie Mae recruited Daniel H. Mudd, he told a friend he wanted to work for an altruistic business. Already a decorated marine and a successful executive, he wanted to be a role model to his four children - just as his father, the television journalist Roger Mudd, had been to him.
I never really wanted to be a journalist, honestly. I always wanted to be a writer, and I thought the only way to apply that interest was with journalism - when you're young and you want to be a writer, it seems like the most practical thing to do with those types of ambitions.
The Lord protects, guides, and watches over those who are His trusted friends in His work. His work and that of His Father and our Father is to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of the children of God. And Satan, the enemy of our happiness, opposes those who serve the Lord.
I used to see my dad and his brothers rhyming, and I knew I wanted to do that one day. I'm like any other boy, always wanting to follow in his father's footsteps.
The way I know my father is not through media. The way I know my father is in number of different ways. It's through the people who knew him well, his friends, my family. It's also through his own words, because he wrote voluminously.
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