Diane Sawyer Quotes

1. An investigation may take six months. A quick interview, profile, a day.





2. Whatever you want in life, other people are going to want it too. Believe in yourself enough to accept the idea that you have an equal right to it.

3. Follow what you are genuinely passionate about and let that guide you to your destination.

4. The one lesson I have learned is that there is no substitute for paying attention.


5. American Idol, I love. I think it's a passing fancy but not passing so soon.

6. People tend to vote the present tense - not the subjective.

7. Hope changes everything, doesn't it? 

8. Great questions make great reporting. 



9. I don't know why I'm saying I'm brave.



10. I don't think it's about entertainment. I think it's about being ourselves.

11. I get involved in the beginning, less in the middle, and very much at the end.

12. Every time somebody tries to go in and reinvent what we do, it always ends up being more about technology and sets, and flash and dash, forgetting the main thing, which is interesting people saying interesting, important things.





13. I have a liberal definition of news because I think news can be what excites people. I'm not very sanctimonious about what news is and isn't.

14. I have a contract but it's not a commitment in the ordinary sense. It's our ongoing conversation.


15. I love the early process of asking questions about a story and deciding which questions matter most.

16. I like talking. I didn't know at the time I would have to worry so much about my hair.

17. I'm always fascinated by the way memory diffuses fact.

18. I'm not sure people are ever completely comfortable telling pollsters what they do and don't think.

19. If you're curious, you'll probably be a good journalist because we follow our curiosity like cats.

20. Part of this new world of completely improvisational terrorism is that there were codes of war that disintegrated in the face of terrorism.

21. Start in a small TV station so you can make all of your embarrassing mistakes early and in front of fewer people!

22. People assume you can't be shy and be on television. They're wrong.





23. The most fun is getting paid to learn things.

24. The interesting thing is always to see if you can find a fact that will change your mind about something, to test and see if you can.

25. We did exactly what everybody in the country did, watching it. You entered this state of sort of denials. You think, well, it must have been a tragic accident by an amateur pilot. And then you see the next plane coming.



26. A criticism is just a really bad way of making a request...so just make the request.

27. You have to start by changing the story you tell yourself about getting older…The minute you say to yourself: "Time is everything, and I'm going to make sure that time is used
the way I dream it should be used," then you've got a whole different story.

28. I read once, which I loved so much, that this great physicist who won a Nobel Prize said that every day when he got home, his dad asked him not what he learned in school but his dad said: "Did you ask any great questions today?" And I always thought, what a beautiful way to educate kids that we're excited by their questions, not by our answers and whether they can repeat our answers.

29. My dad, I still think, had the most beautiful, simple checklist for what you should do in life: Do something you really love that you would do it anyway. Do it in the most adventurous place you can do it. And make sure that it helps other people. And if you feel there's a genuine need for it, and that through that need you can help other people, you're home.

30. Whenever you are blue or lonely or stricken by some humiliating thing you did, the cure and the hope is in caring about other people.


31. (on co-hosting "Good Morning America" 1975 - from "Ladies' Home Journal" interview) The scariest part about taking this job was how many people would know what I really look like when I get up in the morning".

32. Competition is easier to accept if you realize it is not an act of oppression or abrasion…I've worked with my best friends in direct competition.

33. It's in the preparation - in those dreary pedestrian virtues they taught you in seventh grade and you didn't believe. It's making the extra call and caring a lot.




34. A group of women came in and said: "We don't care that the Taliban are threatening our lives, we're going to take off our veils for you, because we want everybody in America to hear us say, you've got to help us".

35. A number of people who study the Koran say there's no basis in the Koran for what they were doing.

36. Anything can be happening in the morning when they're going by. They didn't just come to see us - they wandered by and happened to see us. I love the fact that there's something authentic and real going on.

37. Because it is a conversation we have in the morning, we are forever about, are we doing well what we set out to do? Are we getting in all the things that we want to tell you?

38. Everybody knows when you are talking about life and death matters.



39. I didn't know anything about journalism. But my dad said: "Do you love, and where is an adventurous place to do it?"


40. I don't do verdicts. But I try to present all of the facts.

41. I had just interviewed Lisa Marie Presley. And I was there at the moment Scott Peterson decided that he wanted to tal, so it was just a coincidence of timing.

42. I read this morning that Saddam Hussein also said the love that the Iraqis have for him is so much greater than anything Americans feel for their President because he's been loved for 35 years, he says, the whole 35 years.

43. I simply love the newness of the people, the places, the answers every day.

44. I think everybody was extremely inflamed and tender after September 11. Our very survival was on the stake after that.




45. I think I'm the perfect Afghan woman, nobody can spot me, and meanwhile I'm banging my head on posts and walking into walls and falling off of curbs.

46. I think that the fact that you're hearing so much more about the morning is the constellation of factors right now.


47. I think the evening news is still part of everything, if not everything.

48. I think the toughest thing is when you see somebody in mortal pain and you can't do anything about it.

49. I think we thought for a minute, well, this is going to mute this irrepressible American spirit that we all have. There are forces in the world that are enormous and dangerous.

50. I think we're going to find a lot of evidence of progress on weapons we probably didn't know about.




51. I thought I was so cool. I thought, you're an investigative reporter, operating in Afghanistan. And I didn't know it was against the law to do what I was doing.

52. I was in the Middle East three times during this entire period, and each time it was like a kaleidoscope. You could see the whole thing shifting.

53. I went down to Ground Zero and broadcast through the night.






54. I'm in the business of asking the toughest questions I can possibly ask, and of all sides, of both sides, and letting the people listening make up their minds.

55. I'm not sure that with Primetime that we could do justice to another hour. I don't think we could.

56. I've been in competition in the evening, I know what that's like.






57. If we remember that the first time around, everybody was told that there was no proximate nuclear weapon. And it turned out that there was a proximate possibility of a nuclear weapon.

58. If you want to be ahead, you have to have even more stamina and even less sleep than long ago-though there wasn't much sleep then, either.


59. In magazine work we get to go after the stories that we are passionate about. There are too many great and important stories only to do ho-hum ones.

60. In that instance, as everybody in the country felt, you reorder everything in the world. You're standing at a place where history was, and this is who we will be now.


61. It doesn't get to me. I'm not tired.

62. It is this combination of seeing Michael Jackson, of being suspicious of so many things around him, and at the same time, having seen what may have created him that haunts us.


63. It sometimes takes a little while for a team simply to know everything everybody else on the team is thinking. And we've been there for a long time. And I think it's showing.

64. It takes a long time to compute that this is the thing we have never seen before-and the sound of shrieking, like a missile. This is like a plane being used as a missile.






65. It was some eerie combination of an attempt to control and something that had little to do with the real Muslim world at all.

66. It's about, how intelligent can you make it? How smart can you be? And are you trading against your ability to make something interesting and intelligent?




67. It's automatic energy. It's orange juice. It's a B-12 shot, to have people wandering in off the street, and they look up, and there you are.

68. It's going to take a massive amount of wisdom to keep this country stable through all of this.


69. Last weekend, I wanted to talk to Oprah, so I called her.

70. Mike Nichols is adjusted to my hours now. I leave him a note every morning. He leaves me a note every night.

71. Natalie Maines shot off her mouth and, in effect, shot herself in her foot.

72. On the days you come in and feel like you need about six jolts of caffeine to get going, you open that folder and here's a hilarious story.



73. People expect it to be that kind of diversity in the morning. So all the little things that you were curious about can all be fit in someplace.

74. People write you wonderful, but very personal things.

75. Television seemed bolder and reached more people. That's why I started.





76. The booking war is nothing new. It's only more visible in the morning because you have a third party joining in, but it's always taken place.

77. The Dixie Chicks were saying that they want somebody to remember that in 2003 when we were at with Iraq, that people were arguing about the Dixie Chicks? There is a certain strange proportion here.

78. The language you use, the writing is everything.


79. The question is, who is a parent? Who is a fit parent? Who is a right parent?

80. We are a critical part of the cycle, and we add to the identity. But I think that the evening news still sets the identity.

81. We bump into each other, Barbara and I do, because she's talking on The View and I'm doing another interview. We work 20 feet from each other. We see each other every day, and we laugh and have a great time.

82. We can afford more than bagels in the green room.


83. We have all this power in that we're television. And what is it for, if not to use it for purposes like that, exposing the Taliban?


84. We have this truly muscular team of reporters on GMA.

85. We hope people are tuning in because they think we're thoughtful and fun. We really are having a great time morning after morning.

86. We say: "Oh, we're tired, can we do this anymore?" We can't do this one more day. And then something happens and we laugh. And you can't get rid of us.




87. We went there just months after the Taliban came in. We wanted to get a sense of the place, which seemed so anarchic at the time.

88. We're vying to be the best version of ourself.


89. Who knows how to read the great mind of America?


90. Within terrorism, we now discover that there are factions who operate at a level of savagery where you can't even begin to understand it.

91. You know how it is when someone hasn't spoken at all, and you get a chance just to ask all the questions that we had been sitting at home debating.

92. You try not to look so goofy and giddy because you are so thrilled to be there. But we all look like: "I can't believe I'm doing this!"




93. You want to say exactly what you want to say in the tone of voice you want to say it, but you're not sure you're in control of your tone of voice sometimes.

94. You're gauging your morning by when the news comes on and when the weather comes on, and how much time you have. It really is a nice accompaniment to your morning.

95. You're not sure whether you're reaching people at the level at which your heart is hurting.


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