Top 35 Kara Swisher Quotes

Readers appreciate the truth. Why say, ‘Some think a situation is a mess?’ Based on my reporting, if a situation is a mess, then I say that. The truth is always what reporters tell each other when they get back to the newsroom.

I know: I am a freakish geek. Or is that a geekish freak?

I don’t have bad taste; I have no taste. I wear a lot of the things I wore in high school, but not the cowl-neck sweaters. I was never tall, and I am the same size, so I still wear a lot of those clothes.

Dr. Louis Bush Swisher died from the complications of a brain aneurysm that burst without warning one sunny Sunday morning less than 40 years ago.

One of my favorite vacation memories was the Thai foot massage and Internet access salons in Bangkok, followed up by my testing cellphone coverage while wading in Provincetown Harbor on Cape Cod.

I used to do a lot of casual photography – back in the olden times when one used film – but it had fallen by the wayside over the years.

As I have said many times – I like Facebook. I think it is well built and run. It’s cool. I think it is, in its next-step way, even visionary.

I don’t write about Google except to insult the company.

We really spend a lot of time on building relationships. And so when everyone is like, ‘How do you break so many stories?’ it’s because I build relationships. I do it the old-fashioned way, and I build sourcing relationships, and then I take advantage of those relationships over time.

I bought tiny infant onesies while still in college and compiled a killer toy collection throughout my 20s and 30s.

I don’t mean to sound like a touchy-feely California type here, but I knew that I could finally get over the death of my father only by having kids of my own.

The tech industry – and, more specifically, Silicon Valley – continues to stumble forward in earnest about how few women are represented in its top ranks of management and on its boards.

With giant sites like Facebook and MySpace becoming as generic as Yahoo and AOL of old, more and more sites will be looking for an edge by drilling down deeply to serve a highly targeted audience.

While having a profound impact on the development of values is surely an important job of a good parent, force-feeding opinions to them is not.

Is a family just the strict definition of a small and discrete unit, or is it about the larger organic group that inevitably grows up around the smaller one?

While a lot of what is on Facebook is a better amalgam of what AOL, Yahoo, Amazon, and other Web pioneers introduced long ago, with a nice dash of connection and really identified community, this kind of thing is not a new idea.

The fact of the matter is that the true hits of AOL have always been its easy-to-use services, such as AIM, email, and Buddy Lists.

As anyone who has covered the company for any length of time knows, Yahoo’s record on major decision-making has been akin to a hippie commune – a lot of wrangling internally in a culture where everyone seems to have a voice and a reticence to push the button to launch.

Everything is a narrative in life. I learned that early on as a reporter at the ‘Washington Post.’

It seemed like most of the memories faded before they had time to form. And after a while, my life with my father seemed like a familiar story or a distant dream.

As I always like to keep in mind about everything: Don’t fight the trend.

While I am not saying Facebook cannot be a wonderland for marketers, I am still waiting to see the proof of it, and so should every reporter.

I am an unrepentant tweetaholic. I use the communications service all day long to discover news, interesting tidbits and, of course, to flack the work of our tech and media news site, Re/code.

I don’t think you can look at my history and say they love me to death in Silicon Valley.

I always find something interesting on Twitter that leads me somewhere else.

In Greek mythology, Cassandra was given the gift of prophecy, except – due to her rejection of Apollo’s affections – nobody would ever believe her warnings.

Equipped with two cell phones – one for work and another for home – I like to think of myself as a kind of 21st-century digital pioneer, ready to network, fax, page, e-mail and – oh, yes – talk at will.

BoomTown has long been a big fan of Martha Stewart.

I am a big proponent of being in touch with everyone even when I do not have a story to ask about.

Canceling my landline phone account, cutting off service to my home for good, and rendering the telephones that had long sat on tables in every room as useless as my closeted bread machine, I took the final step in a lifelong attempt to free myself from the wires that tethered me.

My father died when I was only five years old, and that was the moment when I learned a cruel lesson that tomorrow, in fact, might not be another day.

Most reporters are so transactional rather than strategic.

Unlike the messier MySpace, Facebook has a cleaner and easier-to-customize interface and is much more, as Zuckerberg once described it to me, ‘utilitarian.’ I would call it useful and more relevant than other competitors, and a white-label version would likely be a hit.

It’s the nature of journalism to need to be close to your subjects. And either you’re able to be tough on them, which a lot of us are, or you get in bed with them, and some people do.

I love all my scoop children. But consistency and persistence is really my aim.