How Did You Come to Be a Journalist?

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i wanted to be a creative writer, and i hadn't decided how that was going to manifest itself. When i came back from cairo after two years, i sat down and wrotea article for the new yorker called letter from cairo. And of course, i had not informed theNew York Times of my intentions. I sent the article, and i was in a lake house in clitman, texas, and there was an r f d mail box with a little red flag that yo. It seemed that my contribution to the newyorker was picked up at the rf d mail box in equipment texas, went to new york, was rejected and

Lawrence Wright is an author, screenwriter, playwright, and a staff writer for The New Yorker.

”There’s nothing more important about a person than their story. In a way, that’s who we are. And yet, memories fade and people die. So those stories disappear and the job of the journalist is to go out before that happens and accumulate the kinds of stories that are going to help us understand who we are, why we are, where we are right now in time, and try to thread those stories into a coherent narrative. In a way, you give it a kind of immortality. And that’s a big job. It’s a great privilege.”

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