I had been a journalist in Europe and then went to divinity school in the early 1990s, and came out as somebody who had the perspective of a journalist and was now also theologically educated.
If you're a journalist - and I think, on some level, I'm a journalist, and proud to be a journalist, or a documentarian, however you want to describe it - part of what I do has to be the pursuit of the truth.
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'm not a journalist. I'm a pundit. I'm a commentator, I'm somebody with an opinion.
I am unobservant.
If anybody ever tries to do an investigative report on a journalist, much like the kind and the way a journalist would do on a public figure, have you ever seen a stuck pig? Because that's what the journalist looks like.
People can be stunningly unobservant.
I am old enough to think the word 'journalist' is not all that noble a designation. Journalist - that record keeper, quote taker and processor of press releases - was, in the world of letters I grew up in, a lower-down job. To be a writer - once the ambition of every journalist - was to be the greater truth teller.
Bella, it's not my fault if you are exceptionally unobservant.
The dominant and most deep-dyed trait of the journalist is his timorousness. Where the novelist fearlessly plunges into the water of self-exposure, the journalist stands trembling on the shore in his beach robe. The journalist confines himself to the clean, gentlemanly work of exposing the grieves and shames of others.
Are you so unobservant as not to have found out that sanity and happiness are an impossible combination?
It's interesting, though, that in daily life, I think of myself as being relatively unobservant.
Everywhere we look, ideology slouches along the freeways and autoroutes, sometimes carrying a cross, sometimes a sickle, sometimes a crescent, but always busy doing somebody in somewhere, somehow.
The image of the journalist as wallflower at the orgy has been replaced by the journalist as the life of the party.
I dont think I ever wanted to be a journalist - I was more interested in what comes from being a journalist.
I never intended to be a journalist. Frankly, I don't think I ever was a journalist. I backed into it.