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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

Our worst fear isn't the end of life but the end of memories.