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The Quotable David Carr

David Carr during the 2008 Republican National Convention.Credit...Damon Winter/The New York Times

David Carr was often more quotable than the personalities he wrote about. His plainspoken style was sometimes blunt, and searingly honest about himself. The effect was both folksy and sophisticated, a voice from a shrewd and well-informed skeptic.

Here’s a selection of his writing and public statements:

Mr. Carr wrote in 2010 about transparency in journalism in one of his Media Equation columns:

“If you dumped every reporter who ever sent a snide message or talked smack in private, there would be nothing but crickets chirping in newsrooms all over America.”

In “The Night of the Gun,” a memoir, Mr. Carr took to the painful task of reporting on his own life. In a 2008 Times review, it was a called a “brave, heartfelt, often funny, often frustrating book.”

“The trick of enjoying New York is not to be so busy grinding your way to the center of the earth that you fail to notice the sparkle of the place, a scale and a kind of wonder that puts all human endeavors in their proper place.”

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David Carr talks about an incident recounted in his memoir, “The Night of the Gun.”CreditCredit...Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times

At a commencement address last year at the University of California, Berkeley, Graduate School of Journalism, Mr. Carr spoke of the need for decency in the future generation of journalists:

“Being a journalist, I never feel bad talking to journalism students because it’s a grand, grand caper. You get to leave, go talk to strangers, ask them anything, come back, type up their stories, edit the tape. That’s not gonna retire your loans as quickly as it should, and it’s not going to turn you into a person who’s worried about what kind of car they should buy, but that’s kind of as it should be. I mean, it beats working.”

Mr. Carr was a stand-out star in “Page One: Inside the New York Times,” a documentary:

“I don’t do corporate portraiture.”

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‘Page One’: David Carr Confronts Vice

A scene from “Page One: Inside The New York Times,” a 2011 documentary, shows a tense meeting between the media reporter David Carr and Vice magazine executives. It includes graphic language.

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A scene from “Page One: Inside The New York Times,” a 2011 documentary, shows a tense meeting between the media reporter David Carr and Vice magazine executives. It includes graphic language.CreditCredit...Magnolia Pictures

During an interview with Boston University, Mr. Carr discussed the nature of reporting, and how technology is making media more interesting:

“The dirty secret: journalism has always been horrible to get in; you always have to eat so much crap to find a place to stand. I waited tables for seven years, did writing on the side. If you’re gonna get a job that’s a little bit of a caper, that isn’t really a job, that under ideal circumstances you get to at least leave the building and leave your desktop, go out, find people more interesting than you, learn about something, come back and tell other people about it — that should be hard to get into. That should be hard to do. No wonder everybody’s lined up, trying to get into it. It beats working.”

From his article “You Are Where You Tan” about a Memorial Day Weekend with his family:

“I’m the kind of person who showers with his shirt on, so walking the beach at Southampton seemed vaguely mysterious — how could so many people have impossibly perfect tans one day into the season? And where did they all stay? Summer shares that cost $20,000 a month?”

From his article “Me and My Girls” on drug addiction:

“Where does a junkie’s time go? Mostly in 15-minute increments, like a bug-eyed Tarzan, swinging from hit to hit. For months on end in 1988, I sat inside a house in north Minneapolis, doing coke and listening to Tracy Chapman’s ‘Fast Car’ and finding my own pathetic resonance in the lyrics. ‘Any place is better,’ she sang. ‘Starting from zero, got nothing to lose.’ After shooting or smoking a large dose, there would be the tweaking and a vigil at the front window, pulling up the corner of the blinds to look for the squads I was always convinced were on their way. All day. All night. A frantic kind of boring. End-stage addiction is mostly about waiting for the police, or someone, to come and bury you in your shame.”

From an interview with NPR:

“We are entering a golden age of journalism. I do think there has been horrible frictional costs, but I think when we look back at what has happened, I look at my backpack that is sitting here, and it contains more journalistic firepower than the entire newsroom that I walked into 30 to 40 years ago. It’s connected to the cloud, I can make digital recordings of everything that I do, I can check in real time if someone is telling me the truth, I have a still camera that takes video that I can upload quickly and seamlessly.”

From his book, The Night of the Gun:

“I now inhabit a life I don’t deserve, but we all walk this earth feeling we are frauds. The trick is to be grateful and hope the caper doesn’t end soon.”

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