Tom Rachman
Tom Rachman
Tom Rachman is an English/Canadian novelist. His debut novel is The Imperfectionists, published in 2010 by Dial Press, an imprint of Random House. The book has been published in 25 languages...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionNovelist
fill notion pages toss
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.
strength
The strength of fiction is not in reading about yourself, but in reading about other people.
art constantly expanding pushing
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.
art spring hard-work
Art doesn't spring from the muses alone, but from hard work.
ambition love-life men
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.
memories end-of-life ends
Our worst fear isn't the end of life but the end of memories.
complicated
Anything that's worth anything is complicated.
swimming fighting pages
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.
memories illusion end-of-life
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
remember forget overrated
Remembering is the most overrated thing. Forgetting is far superior.
people turns products
People, it turns out, aren't a product of their own time. They're a product of the time before theirs
reading defense common
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.
training fiction hours
The training of a journalist, of working with words for thousands of hours, is extraordinarily useful for a fiction writer.
book reading meditation
Many things embarrass me, but reading isnt one of them. Im not ashamed of my slightly weird collection of prison memoirs. Nor the flaky meditation books. After all, I can pretend I never read those.