Quotes By Bob Schieffer

My bladder cancer was related to smoking, and I think smoking kills people.

And I came away from that experience, and it was a very difficult experience - I came to understand that you have to practice at being a good father and practice at being a good husband, just as you have to practice at being a good journalist.

But here's the deal: If I were smart, I could figure out curling. If I were even smarter, I could figure out why people would actually watch other people doing it. I have tried. I can't. I can't even figure out the object of the game. Is it like darts? I just don't get it.

Had there been a reporter along with Lieutenant Calley when he massacred those people in Vietnam, I think that probably wouldn't have happened.

If you get asked a really tough question and you give a really good answer, you come off looking really good.

I've had a lot of fun, and when I talk to kids in journalism schools, I say, look, I know what the journalism teachers tell you that this is a great way to perform public service and all that, but I say the main reason, if you decide what you want to do is be a reporter, the main reason you want to do it is because it's just so much fun.

The Iraq war was fought by one-half of one percent of us. And unless we were part of that small group or had a relative who was, we went about our lives as usual most of the time: no draft, no new taxes, no changes. Not so for the small group who fought the war and their families.

And after about two years, I realized that creative writing was not going to help you ace those biological tests. So I switched over to journalism. I didn't graduate with honors, but I did graduate on time and with some doing.

It's getting the right person that's the challenge.

But the reporter has the responsibility to determine, number one, whether that is true, and number two, to make a judgment as to whether it's in the public interest and whether or not it should be part of the debate.

We now assume that when people turn on the evening news, they basically already know what the news is. They've heard it on the radio. They've seen it on the Internet. They've seen it on one of the cable companies. So that makes our job a bit different.

In so many of the other beats these days, there are these layers of public relations people that you have to go through to get to the newsmakers themselves.

People are more sophisticated in the way they go about dealing with the press.

The government's view is that the best time to announce bad news, news that it doesn't want the public to dwell on is late on a Friday, when it will wind up in the Saturday papers, which if you were readers, then the week day editions. A holiday weekend is even better.

Nowadays I'm not even sure if newspapers take into account whether a person is a good writer.

But with 9/11, we found that people tended to come back to the networks and the people who had been our core viewers in the past came back and they have stayed with us.

I want to try to talk like normal people talk, not just stand there and bark at the camera.

They've asked me to do this temporarily. I don't know what temporarily means. Life is temporary.

I think journalism is a great way to do public service, to have an impact on your community.

One thing young people have to always keep in mind when deciding what they want to do with their lives is, is it fun? Is it something that I'm interested in? Is it something I enjoy?

But if you don't enjoy doing something, you'll be miserable no matter how much money you make.

I mean, you know, God knows everything, but I'm not quite that good. Every once in a while, something will slip by me.

With Vietman, we found ourselves involved there before we really understood what was going on.

I used to be a print reporter.

Obviously, if the commander makes certain decisions that the reporter thinks is inhibiting his right to report a legitimate story, he has to appeal to the commander's boss to get that changed.

My job is to give everyone a chance to catch their breath and step back from all this and get back to work.

American politics used to be an amateur sport. But somewhere along the way, we handed over to professionals all the things people used to do for free.

I've basically thought of myself as a writer, whether I was or not.

There's fierce competition between all the networks to get the guest who can bring the most pertinent information about whatever the story of the moment happens to be.

Once we get them in the studio, you interview a person the same way you would interview another. You ask them a question. You let them answer. You try to listen closely and then ask a follow-up.