If I wasn't a writer/director, I would be an investigative journalist. There's something about being an undercover journalist. I mean, that's freakin' cool!
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.
I consider myself to be a guerrilla journalist. Some would call me a provocateur, but I am a journalist who uses ambush and undercover tactics to uncover the truth and expose people for who they truly are.
I'm a reasonably accomplished journalist. I've worked as an investigative journalist, I've done crime beat stuff.
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.
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 dont think I ever wanted to be a journalist - I was more interested in what comes from being a journalist.
I don't think I ever wanted to be a journalist - I was more interested in what comes from being a journalist.
Journalism has been very important for me - for a long time I made my living as a journalist, and it also serves as a source of ideas. Many of the things I have written I would not have written without the experience of being a journalist.
There's something very strange about associating me with that prize. I had hoped for it in a more directed way as a journalist. Somehow as a journalist you know there are Pulitzers out there and you can work hard and get one. To win it for Fiction seems unbelievable.
Over the years, I'd hear Jon Stewart disavow being a journalist and say, 'No, I'm a comedian.' I'd be like, 'Stop pretending. You know you're a journalist.'
So much of our cultural representation of what an investigative journalist looks like, in movies and pop culture, is about this really testosterone-filled dude screaming, "Give me what you got!" I didn't see myself as someone who would be good at or comfortable with that.
I'm not an investigative journalist; I don't track crime or police blotters.
I worked both as a Russian journalist and an American journalist and ran a bunch of magazines in Moscow over the course of about 20 years.
I'd go for "really great writer." Although I don't think I am. I know I have a style which is recognizable. I think you can see Terry Pratchett in every book. I like doing it. I was once a journalist. And I think of myself as a journalist, and that's it.
Generally it's not a good idea to wear Banana Republic - type khaki journalist clothes in a war zone. You might look too much like something that's supposed to be shot, such as a journalist.