Daily Inspiration Quote by Alma Guillermoprieto

There is a quiet flex tucked inside Guillermoprieto's modest phrasing: the best reporting begins before the press pass. By claiming she was "closely observant" long before she was a reporter, she shifts authority away from institutional credentialing and toward a temperament - a way of moving through the world with the senses turned on. The line reads like a rebuke to the myth that journalism is primarily a skill set you acquire in a newsroom. For her, the craft is an extension of a personality: patient, attentive, and suspicious of first impressions.

The context matters: she's describing the act of "looking back" and writing from memory, which is journalism's awkward cousin and its secret engine. Memory is notoriously unreliable, yet it's also where perception gets tested - what stuck, what didn't, what the mind edited out to protect itself. Guillermoprieto frames memoir-like excavation not as indulgence but as fieldwork on the self. The subtext is that witnessing is never neutral; it starts early, shaped by class, gender, geography, and whatever danger or beauty trained your attention. In Latin American reporting, where she built her reputation, the ability to notice what power tries to make invisible is not decorative - it's survival and politics.

Her intent, then, is twofold: to naturalize her authority (I have always watched) and to complicate it (what I saw was filtered through a remembered self). It's an elegant way of saying: the reporter was there before the byline, and so were the biases.