Adam Clymer Quotations

Another thing that's quite different in writing a book as a practicing newspaperman is that if you look at what you've written the next morning and you think you didn't get it quite right, you can fix it.

When I came back to Washington to be The Times' chief congressional correspondent in 1991, I was looking for a book subject, and Ted Kennedy stood out for two reasons.

Ted Kennedy is the only person alive who might know more than we do about Chappaquiddick, and he may not.

I thought writing about somebody current would be a little closer to what I'm used to doing.

There's a Washington standard of casually putting things off the record. It's really gone too far. I don't know an easy way to turn it back.

Democratic politicians have disliked things I've written, Republican politicians... if they all love you, you might as well be driving a Good Humor truck.

It isn't clear to me, and it isn't clear to people at the paper, exactly why the waiver wasn't acceptable in its earlier form when other people found ways to find it acceptable.

Using bad language while promising to restore dignity to the White House is a contradiction that will hurt him in a tiny, modest way.

Gore speaks to America as if English is its second language; George W. speaks as if English is his second language.

Ted Kennedy's achievements as a senator have towered over his time, changing the lives of far more Americans than remember the name Mary Jo Kopechne.

Texas has had one of the nation's worst public health records for decades. More than a quarter of its citizens have no health insurance.

This is one of his core issues, one of the things he has been concerned about the longest.

A lot of the reporters have really been wondering and doubting their editors. It wasn't that they knew the defense of Judy was wrong, but they didn't have a sense of what was being defended. . . . People all over the paper think the Times should have been covering the story harder.

I don't think the Times looks any better today than it did yesterday.