Tom Rachman Quotes & Sayings

“Journalists who are devoted to strictly factual reporting take particular pleasure from satirical news outlets that have the liberty to laugh and even mock the hypocrisy that reporters and editors must simply observe without comment.”

“That's a paradox I've noticed, too: The news business held little romance for me, yet writing about it somehow stirred my affections.”

“At the outset, my notion of being a writer was that you would have moments of inspiration and moments of frustration, when you'd crumple up your pages and toss them away. On one side, the dustbin would fill up, and on the other side, pages would rise into a novel.”

“I don't like most contemporary art. But I think if you talked to any person who's heavily involved in contemporary art, they'd say the same thing. If you go to a biennale, you don't expect to like much of it.”

“Art doesn't spring from the muses alone, but from hard work.”

“I had pictured journalism as I'd seen it in the most ennobling films, where the reporter battles for the truth, propelled by conviction, and is triumphant. There are journalists who fit that ideal.”

“The training of a journalist, of working with words for thousands of hours, is extraordinarily useful for a fiction writer.”

“A common defense among obituary-fanciers such as myself is that the obit is not about death at all. It is about life. This is true since an article about the condition of deadness would make for turgid reading at best.”

“During my past career as a journalist, I relished writing obits and equally dreaded phoning relatives for the necessary facts. But to my surprise and great relief, they often wanted to talk - they wanted their recently deceased loved ones recorded in print.”

“Many things embarrass me, but reading isn't one of them. I'm not ashamed of my slightly weird collection of prison memoirs. Nor the flaky meditation books. After all, I can pretend I never read those.”