80 Quotes by Tom Rachman

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.

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.

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.

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.

My intent was to gain experience for fiction I eventually hoped to write. But there's no question I was drawn in by the hope that journalism would be a creative, thrilling environment.

Obituaries were among my favorite to write because they have elements no other news stories have - a story from start to finish with a proper conclusion.

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

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