Diane Sawyer quotes:

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

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

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.

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.

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.

I get to go to work and come home with something interesting or enriching or astonishing.

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

I think the one lesson I have learned is that there is no substitute for paying attention.

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

I've always found a cure for the blues is wandering into something unknown, and resting there, before coming back to whatever weight you were carrying.

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

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

Sometimes I forget some of the things I've done. I recently recalled that after Watergate I went away by myself to Tahiti for a month, moving from island to island. That was a point in my life where I didn't know what was next.

I've always been curious. I keep a list of people I'd love to have lunch with, like the Pope or Leonard Cohen. I'll read an article about someone I've never met and think, 'I should ask him to lunch!'

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

Hope changes everything, doesn't it?

I think there's a point at which you know how you dress isn't going to affect how much you do in life.

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

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.

Barbara Ehrenreich is smart, provocative, funny, and sane in a world that needs more of all four.

Memory diffuses fact.

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

If there were a rehab for curiosity; I'd be in it.

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

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.

I've always wanted to throw a party where everyone comes with their mother's meatloaf. Everybody could evoke their mother's memory through her meatloaf.

A good marriage is a contest of generosity.

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.

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

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

I keep trying to perfect my mother's meatloaf recipe. I will never get it perfect, but I'm getting closer.

My husband has said even he doesn't know my politics. In the nonromantic-compliment category, that's a good one.

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.

I so believe in the fact that we are somehow born to love the truth

Don't let other people tell you who you are.

... the greatest act of love is to pay attention.

Do something you really love in the most adventurous place you can and make sure it helps other people.

Someone said to me... 'A criticism is just a really bad way of making a request. So why don't you just make the request? Why don't you just say, Could we work out this thing that makes me feel this way?'

One day you're the statue. One day you're the pigeon.

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.

Wake up curious, and determined to find an answer

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

Ive always found a cure for the blues is wandering into something unknown, and resting there, before coming back to whatever weight you were carrying.

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.

The most fun is getting paid to learn things.

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

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.

Great questions make great reporting.

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

There's a definite sense this morning on the part of the Kerry voters that perhaps this is code, 'moral values,' is code for something else. It's code for taking a different position about gays in America, an exclusionary position, a code about abortion, code about imposing Christianity over other faiths.

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

It has been wonderful to be the home port for the brave and brilliant forces of ABC News around the world and to feel every single night that you and I were in a conversation about the day together,

I think no one knows my politics.

Einstein was always looking for a unifying principle for the universe. I think anxiety about hair is the unifying principle.

I love cabdrivers. I love their unpredictable manners. I love the pictures of their families on the visors. I love the fact that most of them think I'm Martha Stewart.

I read this morning that he's [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.

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

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

The dream is not the destination but the journey.

The Center for Public Integrity is the real thing. A group of dedicated people who remember that great journalism is about grit and guts and stamina and razor-sharp instincts. They are, thank heaven, here to stay.