Tom Rachman Quotes

You can't dread what you can't experience. The only death we experience is that of other people. That's as bad as it gets. And that's bad enough, surely.

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

Basically, financial reporting is this sinking hole at the centre of journalism. You start by swimming around it until finally, reluctantly, you can't fight the pull anymore and you get sucked down the drain into the biz pages.

Why had she? That's just how she was. But damn how she was! She didn't accept that how one was is how one must remain. Consistency in character was a form of tragedy.

Will you have kids?"
"You make such an attractive case for the reproductive plunge. I don't know, Duncan. Childhood is so exhausting."
"As a parent?"
"I mean as the child. Not sure it's fair to drop somebody else into life without giving them a choice in the matter."
"You'll find it's kind of tough to canvass the opinion of sperm."
"I prefer asking the eggs - they're more articulate. Anyway, aren't you the guy who's always bemoaning the future of humanity? Saying how the worst jerks always have millions of babies, meaning the world gets worse every generation?"
"Exactly why decent people need to have kids.

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Remembering is the most overrated thing. Forgetting is far superior.

Now I help you find her." He stood up from behind the table, smoothed down his tie. "I sit for too long. My leg goes to bed."
"To sleep?"
"Thank you, small person. At rare time, I am making mistake in English-language speaking, so thanks for accurate fixation. Now we find Sarah. You follow. Stay near. There are trivial beings everywhere.

I hadn't been a particularly precocious reader, but everybody else in my family was.

Good reporting and good behavior are mutually exclusive.

He glances at the sorry trio of copy editors before him: Dave Belling, a simpleton far too cheerful to compose a decent headline; Ed Rance, who wears a white ponytail
what more need one say?; and Ruby Zaga, who is sure that the entire staff is plotting against her, and is correct. What is the value in remonstrating with such a feckless triumvirate?

You know, there's that silly saying 'We're born alone and we die alone' -it's nonsense. We're surrounded at birth and surrounded at death. It is in between that we're alone.

People, it turns out, aren't a product of their own time. They're a product of the time before theirs

The only death we experience is that of other people

The question I ask myself is what would have happened if newspapers hadn't initially given their content away for free on the Internet. It's so hard to get people to pay once they are accustomed to having something for free.

What the art world has done, it has been constantly been pushing the boundaries about what art can be. It's like expanding its territory.

What is wrong with guys? Half are molting; half are nothing but undergrowth.

As for Humphrey, he was never renowned for tidiness. "My nature abhors the vacuum," he said.

Vodka is like water, but with consequences.

She is a wonderful nerd, and he hopes this won't change.

The strength of fiction is not in reading about yourself, but in reading about other people.

Books," he said, "are like mushrooms. They grow when you are not looking. Books increase by rule of compound interest: one interest leads to another interest, and this compounds into third. Next, you have so much interest there is no space in closet.

Writing (and reading) is a sort of exercise in empathy, I think. In life, when you encounter people, you and they have separate trajectories, each person pushing in a different direction. What's remarkable about fiction is that it places you in the uncommon position of having no trajectory. You stand aside, motives abandoned for the duration. The characters have the trajectories now, while you just observe. And this stirs compassion that, in real life, is so often obscured by our own motives. What

When I left Toronto and entered journalism in the late 1990s, I had many notions about the news business, nearly all of them wrong, as it turned out.

Journalism is a bunch of dorks pretending to be alpha males.

He was right to notice something missing. She had not stated her fundamental view: that, for Duncan, time and place, fortune and misfortune, only had a glancing impact. He was temperamentally condemned to embitterment and would revert to that condition regardless of circumstances, just as lottery winners, after the euphoria, ended up as morose or cheerful as they'd ever been. People did not see the world for what it was but for what they were.

Which is where I met my my husband. Not currently my husband. My ex. Though he wasn't that then. I never know how to say that."
"Allow my copydesk expertise to intervene: your then-pre-husband, later-to-be-post-husband in his prior-to-ex-husband status.

Literally: This word should be deleted. All too often, actions described as "literally" did not happen at all. As in, "He literally jumped out of his skin." No, he did not. Though if he literally had, I'd suggest raising the element and proposing the piece for page one. Inserting "literally" willy-nilly reinforces the notion that breathless nitwits lurk within this newsroom. Eliminate on sight - the usage, not the nitwits. The nitwits are to be captured

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.

I say that ambition is absurd, and yet I remain in its thrall. It's like being a slave all your life, then learning one day that you never had a master, and returning to work all the same.

I went to the University of Toronto to study the history and theory of film, in the back of my mind thinking I'd go to NYU film school and see if I could make a career of it.

He was a man who formed opinions as he spoke them, or perhaps afterward, requiring him to ramble at length to grasp what he believed.

The relationships that counted were those of choice, which made friendship the supreme bond, one that either party could sever, and all the more valuable for its precariousness.

Books increase by rule of compound interest: one interest leads to another interest, and this compounds into third.

Did she answer my email yet?' That's the new obesity.

There are journalists who are drawn to the most extroverted, aggressive jobs because they get an ego high from it. It can be shocking to encounter them and even worse to work with them.

Xavi never did see the end of the Iraq War; he died at the peak of the pandemonium there, though he'd stopped caring, having receded from the world in stages: aware of just the hospice, then just his room, then his bed, then his body, then nothing.

When, she wonders, do people have time to contemplate anything? But she has no time to answer that.

He cannot deny a certain relief in being able to sift through academic tomes, fulfilling his journalistic duty without having to barge past security guards at the Arab League or grab man-on-the-street from women at the market. This library work is easily his favorite part of reporting so far.

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

In teen years, people yearned to be liked; in their twenties, to be impressive; in their thirties, to be needed

Fogg's most salient quality as an employee was his ability to be present while she fetched a sandwich. Beyond this, he contributed little that could be quantified.

Here is a fact: nothing in all civilization has been as productive as ludicrous ambition. Whatever its ills, nothing has created more. Cathedrals, sonatas, encyclopedias: love of God was not behind them, nor love of life. But the love of man to be worshiped by man.

Unlike in books, there was no concluding page on the Internet, just a limitless chain that left her tired, tense, up too late.

Anything that's worth anything is complicated.

In his pocket, the mobile phone beeped and wriggled. They'd said on the radio that the entirety of human knowledge was available on these handsets, that smartphones had outsmarted their owners. But, for now, he was in control, and the nagging gadget had to wait. He took only a glance at the little screen, enough to see that the text came from Tooly. He pocketed the phone and finished tidying up the Honesty Barrel. Soon he'd read her message and he would know. But not yet. That present had not arrived yet. This one lingered.

Everyone's their own nation, with their own blog. Because everybody has something important to say; everybody's putting out press releases on what they ate for breakfast. It's the era of self-importance.

Venn was like a devilish older sibling, offering that brotherly combination of wholly unreliable and utterly trustworthy.

The Internet is to news," he said, "what car horns are to music.

One becomes more of a shit as one gets older.

What I really fear is time. That's the devil: whipping us on when we'd rather loll, so the present sprints by, impossible to grasp, and all is suddenly past, a past that won't hold still, that slides into these inauthentic tales. My past- it doesn't feel real in the slightest. The person who inhabited it is not me. It's as if the present me is constantly dissolving. There's that line from Heraclitus: 'No man steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river and he is not the same man.' That's quite right. We enjoy this illusion of continuity, and we call it memory. Which explains, perhaps, why our worst fear isn't the end of life but the end of memories.

As touchy as cabaret performers and as stubborn as factory machinists ...

Veto is like if you make big sandwich - careful and nice you make it - and I come over and eat sandwich. No question asked. This is how veto works.

I wanted to show, as Tooly's life enfolds [in The Rise & Fall of Great Powers], how one's earliest stories condition how one encounters the world: what one expects of strangers, whether one counts on justice, whether one veers into cynicism or veers back again.

What's remarkable about fiction is that it places you in the unusual position of having no trajectory. You stand aside, motives abandoned for the duration. The characters have the trajectories now, while you just observe. And this stirs compassion that, in real life, is so often obscured by our own motives.

Don't you find it striking? The personality is constantly dying and it feels like continuity. Meanwhile, we panic about death, which we cannot ever experience. Yet it is this illogical fear that motivates our lives. We gore each other and mutilate ourselves for victory and fame, as if these might swindle mortality and extend us somehow. Then, as death bears down, we agonize over how little we have achieved.

News' is often a polite way of saying 'editor's whim.

The purpose of clothing, as best he could tell, was to keep one unembarrassed and at the right temperature. If an outfit served that purpose for a respectable period - twenty years, say - and at the lowest price available, then it was successful.

I built and I built - heaven knows I have done that well. Those skyscrapers, full of tenants, floor after floor, and not a single room containing you. You asked why I came here to Rome. I never cared about the news. I came to be in the same room as you, even if I had to build that room, fill it with people, with typewriters, the rest. I only hope you understand that the paper was for you.

Milton stood among his staff, shaking hands, memorising names. He already knew them in a way - he understood this breed backward and had foreseeen how his speech would be received. Journalists were as touchy as Cabernet performers and as stubborn as factory machinists. He couldn't help smiling.

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.

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

My own career started in New York at the 'Associated Press', a fast-paced news agency where we rarely had time for deep reporting.

She doesn't remember the twentieth century. Isn't that terrifying?