Quotes by Tom Rachman

About 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.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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

Tom Rachman

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

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 ...

Tom Rachman

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

Tom Rachman

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

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

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

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

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...

Tom Rachman

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

The way I found time to write 'The Imperfectionists' was that I took work as a copy editor at the 'International Herald Tribune' in Paris, working full-time for approximately six months, then taking my savings from that and writing full-time, then re...

Tom Rachman

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

Tom Rachman

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

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

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

Author Bio

  • NameTom Rachman
  • DescriptionCanadian writer
  • Born1974
  • CountryCanada
  • ProfessionWriter; Journalist; Novelist