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

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

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...

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

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...

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.

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...

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.

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...

The greatest influence over content was necessity–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...

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.

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.

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...

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

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.

I have to wonder if you’re not being slightly naive here. I mean, are you saying that you want nothing for people? You have no motives? Everybody has motives. Name the person, the circumstances, I’ll...

…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...

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.

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.

What’s it like being drunk? Like being awake and asleep at the same time.

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....

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

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

When she realizes that Nigel is having an affair, her first sentiment is satisfaction that she figured it out. Her second is that, despite all the palaver about betrayal, it doesn’t feel so terrible.This is...

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...

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

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

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...

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

…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...

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...

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.

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.

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.