Tom Rachman Quotes

#1. 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.

Tom Rachman

#2. She has been dreading tomorrow ever since it happened the first time.

Tom Rachman

#3. 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.

Tom Rachman

#4. 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.

Tom Rachman

#5. 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.

Tom Rachman

#6. 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.

Tom Rachman

#7. 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.

Tom Rachman

#8. 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.

Tom Rachman

#9. One becomes more of a shit as one gets older.

Tom Rachman

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

Tom Rachman

#11. 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.

Tom Rachman

#12. 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.

Tom Rachman

#13. 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.

Tom Rachman

#14. But my point, you see is that death is misunderstood. The loss of one's life is not the greatest loss. It is no loss at all. To others, perhaps, but not to oneself.

Tom Rachman

#15. The only death we experience is that of other people

Tom Rachman

#16. Good reporting and good behavior are mutually exclusive.

Tom Rachman

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

Tom Rachman

#18. Maybe we're all ongoing stories, defined at various stages of life, or whenever people oblige us to declare ourselves. Fiction is marvelous for studying this, allowing the writer and reader to leap decades in a sentence. No other art lets you bend time as much.

Tom Rachman

#19. I'm too romantic for my own good. And okay, you get kicked in the butt sometimes. But, frankly, I'd rather have, you know - actual sentiments. Than. You know? You know what I mean?

Tom Rachman

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

Tom Rachman

#21. Anything that's worth anything is complicated.

Tom Rachman

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

Tom Rachman

#23. Nothing, not even dictionaries, can tell you what anything means," he said. "The reality of things is just sad, for the most part.

Tom Rachman

#24. 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.

Tom Rachman

#25. They had holes to fill on every page and jammed in any vaguely newsworthy string of words provided it didn't include expletives, which they were apparently saving for their own use around the office.

Tom Rachman

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

Tom Rachman

#27. 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.

Tom Rachman

#28. Don't people drown their sorrows in things like scotch? Not strawberry whatever-it's-called.

Tom Rachman

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

Tom Rachman

#30. This is good for my ego after, like, two years of seeing Italian guys in pink sweaters and orange pants and, like, pulling it off. You know what I'm saying?

Tom Rachman

#31. 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.

Tom Rachman

#32. But is good to meet fellow intellectual," he continued. "I celebrate occasion with small drink. Unfortunate, I am impossibility to move."
"Why?"
"Because I find myself in sitting position.

Tom Rachman

#33. 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.

Tom Rachman

#34. 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.

Tom Rachman

#35. Looking back, has this journalism experience been a nightmare for you?'
'Not entirely.'
'Did you enjoy any of it?'
'I liked going to the library,' he says. 'I think I prefer books to people
primary sources scare me.

Tom Rachman

#36. So why do you kiss someone?" she asks. "To give pleasure or to take it?

Tom Rachman

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

Tom Rachman

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

Tom Rachman

#39. 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.

Tom Rachman

#40. 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.

Tom Rachman

#41. 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.

Tom Rachman

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

Tom Rachman

#43. 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.

Tom Rachman

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

Tom Rachman

#45. Four years ago, he'd nearly married. But his girlfriend went to do theater in London and met a new man there. They'd stayed friends, till she sent photos of her newborn. "When you open the baby-photo email," Fogg said, "it's like your friends waving goodbye.

Tom Rachman

#46. 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.

Tom Rachman

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

Tom Rachman

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

Tom Rachman

#49. It occurs to me that I've been wrong about something: I always assumed that age and experience weather you, make you more resilient. But that's not true. It's the opposite.

Tom Rachman

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

Tom Rachman

#51. 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.

Tom Rachman

#52. There's a 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.

Tom Rachman

#53. 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.

Tom Rachman

#54. 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.

Tom Rachman

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

Tom Rachman

#56. 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.

Tom Rachman

#57. Vodka is like water, but with consequences.

Tom Rachman

#58. 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.

Tom Rachman

#59. 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.

Tom Rachman

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

Tom Rachman

#61. If history has taught us anything, Arthur muses, it is that men with mustaches must never achieve positions of power.

Tom Rachman

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

Tom Rachman

#63. 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.

Tom Rachman

#64. She hasn't known many Southerners. That twang and aw-shucks about him
it's sort of exotic.

Tom Rachman

#65. 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.

Tom Rachman

#66. Nothing epitomizes the futility of human striving quite like aspartame.

Tom Rachman

#67. 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.

Tom Rachman

#68. 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.

Tom Rachman

#69. My parents used to rent old movies - my whole childhood is in black and white - and it was my dream to make films.

Tom Rachman

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

Tom Rachman

#71. 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.

Tom Rachman

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

Tom Rachman

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

Tom Rachman

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

Tom Rachman

#75. 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.

Tom Rachman

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

Tom Rachman

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

Tom Rachman