Well, one of the things I discovered in the course of looking back and writing about what I saw in my memory is that I was a closely observant person long before I became a reporter.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
For somebody who is a journalist, I can be awfully unobservant sometimes.
When I was a general assignment reporter early in my career, I was the one knocking on their door after a tragedy.
I was so thrilled being a reporter, because it gave you the kind of access to people that you wouldn't ever get to meet.
I've been a reporter for 20 years, and I don't ever get things wrong. That's important in terms of my professional status.
Long before the arrival of reality TV - before speed cameras, before recording angels on buses and lampposts - I felt I was living in a country that already knew how to watch itself. It was journalism that held the responsibility for seeing who we were and noticing what we did.
I'm an inexperienced reporter, and I'm still learning.
I had been a reporter for 15 years when I set out to write my first novel. I knew how to research an article or profile a subject - skills that I assumed would be useless when it came to fiction. It was from my imagination that the characters in my story would emerge.
I thank God I was a reporter before I became a writer.
My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests.
I've always thought of myself as a reporter.