I Won't Tell You to Stay but I'm Coming to Much More

Perhaps it's because I'm generally a bigger fan of nonfiction than fiction, but after the outpouring of praise for Kurt Vonnegut at his recent death (praise that was well deserved), I think I'm going to miss David Halberstam more. I'll miss him like I miss other people that I've never met, but who have somehow influenced the way that I think and look at the world. Something like that.

• When he was killed in the car accident, he was on his way to interview someone for his next book. I don't think I want to be killed in a car accident, but that's how I want to go out of this world: Moving forward, looking ahead to the next thing on the horizon, and doing what I love.
• "He was a man who didn't have a lazy bone in his body."
• "A writer should be like a playwright — putting people on stage, putting ideas on stage, making the reader become the audience."
• His truthful reporting on the less than stellar Vietnam War efforts once led JFK to place a call with NY Times publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger asking for Halberstam's reassignment. Halberstam stayed on the Vietnam beat.
• "Being a professional is doing the things you love to do, even on days you don't feel like doing them."