Sarah Stillman Quotes

• There’s no such thing as being totally ‘found’…the fun, I think, is in the searching.

  Sarah Stillman

  Fun, Thinking, Found

  6 Copy quote

• I think when I was doing my very first interviews, I probably brought a notepad and did ask people my first fifteen questions while sitting in a Starbucks or something horrible like that. And I found that, oftentimes, the most important thing at the very first interview is just establishing a personal connection and developing some sort of rapport so that I can go back to them again, and then maybe again, and maybe again after that.

  Sarah Stillman

  Thinking, People, Important

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• There is space for a different kind of investigative reporting that's about immersion and obsessive attention to detail and deep listening.

  Sarah Stillman

  Space, Listening, Details

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  5 Copy quote

• What narrative journalism does is create a language or open up a space where someone can say, "Oh, this happened to me, too."

  Sarah Stillman

  Journalism, Language

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• One thing I've discovered is that if you remain in contact with people, if you build longitudinal relationships, if you invest in sources who seem at first like they're uncomfortable or unwilling to talk, if you keep in touch with them, a year later that might yield something much more powerful.

  Sarah Stillman

  Powerful, Yield, Years

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• I tend to only be able to obsess about one thing at once, and become fully engaged in and only interested in that thing. But in the longer term, a lot of my stories also give birth to other stories.

  Sarah Stillman

  Giving, Birth, Term

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• It's been nice, actually, to keep in touch with a lot of the people and families that I've written about. Like with the kids I was just writing about from Guatemala, who survived being kidnapped and fleeing violence, it was nice to just sit down in their living room and play bingo with them, go to dinner with the family. And sometimes not thinking about it in such a mechanistic "I am now coming to report and get what I need" way, but just spending time, helps you see a more natural version of who they are too.

  Sarah Stillman

  Nice, Writing, Kids

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• I try to come to my reporting as a real, whole person, not an automaton. And it's always one of the strange discomforts of the job, that you're in this very intense moment in someone's life - you're engaging with them nonstop - and then suddenly your piece is out and that's done. It always reminds me that the journalist's job isn't to be someone's friend, or their psychologist, or anything other than what we actually are. And at the end of the day, that can definitely seem like such a strange, extractive relationship.

  Sarah Stillman

  Real, Trying, Done

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• I always knew I wanted to write, but I didn't know that I would want to do investigative reporting - in part because it seemed so ill-suited for my personality, or I thought it was ill-suited for my personality, insofar as I'm not very aggressive, and I'm not confrontational.

  Sarah Stillman

  Writing, Personality, Want

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• I tend to gravitate toward the "act two," or "act three," or "act four" stories - either things that are underreported, where we think we already know the common narrative, or things that are at the margins of an over-reported story, where we're all so focused in one direction that we're missing something crucial that's unfolding off to the side.

  Sarah Stillman

  Thinking, One Direction, Two

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  5 Copy quote

• I think the daily challenge for a lot of beat reporters is, how do you get past the regurgitated sound bites of powerful people or evasion masters who are so used to this routine - the theatricality of press conferences and stage-managed interviews and teams of handlers?

  Sarah Stillman

  Powerful, Team, Past

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• So much of our cultural representation of what an investigative journalist looks like, in movies and pop culture, is about this really testosterone-filled dude screaming, "Give me what you got!" I didn't see myself as someone who would be good at or comfortable with that.

  Sarah Stillman

  Giving, Would Be, Culture

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  12 Copy quote

• Thinking through how you find that intersection between individual, compelling human narratives and structural, systemic injustices - that's the place that's most interesting to me as a reporter.

  Sarah Stillman

  Thinking, Interesting, Narrative

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• Workers are actually being starved on the largest military base in Baghdad, and women are being raped with impunity - and because it doesn't fit into a Hollywood context it's not going to fly.

  Sarah Stillman

  Military, Baghdad, Hollywood

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• I feel like I partly came to writing through being in college during the start of the Iraq war, and knowing that those issues mattered lot to me, and wanting to go see for myself.

  Sarah Stillman

  War, Writing, College

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• Often, my central challenge is figuring out how do I build trust, how do I acquaint people who've just endured some terrible event - losing their child to murder, say, or being sexually assaulted - with the bizarre and sometimes invasive nature of in-depth interviews that aren't just a quick list of ten questions?

  Sarah Stillman

  Children, Terrible Events, People

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• Often, I'm spending months with a person in a very intimate context, getting to know the ins and outs of what they ate for breakfast, not to mention dredging up the most traumatic experiences of their lives, digging through their documents and photographs from difficult times, all of that. And that process, I think, can be extraordinarily strange for subjects who've never been interviewed before, especially if you don't acquaint them from the get-go with what you're trying to do, what it entails, and why you care.

  Sarah Stillman

  Thinking, Trying, Digging

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• I wanted to think about ways to get an American readership concerned with what is happening in Mexico, but also to reframe it as a problem Americans share.

  Sarah Stillman

  Thinking, Way, Mexico

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• The tremendous challenge of narrative journalism about subjects that are underreported is, how do you make people care about something they think they already know about, or think they don't need to know about?

  Sarah Stillman

  Thinking, People, Challenges

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• People are sometimes losing their homes before being convicted of a crime, or their cash or their cars.

  Sarah Stillman

  Home, People, Car

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• I think most of us, as writers, have had experiences where you get edited and it doesn't feel like your voice at all. And so it's been nice to go through the experience of having a lot wind up on the cutting-room floor, and yet still feel that your voice is being - not purified, but made more yourself. I think that's a very rare thing.

  Sarah Stillman

  Nice, Cutting, Thinking

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• The journalist's job isn't to be someone's friend, or their psychologist, or anything other than what we actually are. And at the end of the day, that can definitely seem like such a strange, extractive relationship.

  Sarah Stillman

  Jobs, The End Of The Day, Strange

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• I try to come to my reporting as a real, whole person, not an automaton.

  Sarah Stillman

  Real, Trying, Persons

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• I learned a lot, investigative methodology - wise, from litigators - watching their process.

  Sarah Stillman

  Wise, Litigators, Methodology

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• For me, the part of reporting that's the most rewarding and energizing is just hearing directly from people whose voices haven't often been heard, or incorporated into mainstream media. That stuff is really, really gratifying, and so to realize that you could make a career of that part of it, that appealed to me.

  Sarah Stillman

  Media, Careers, Voice

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

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