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

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.

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.

Anything that's worth anything is complicated.

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

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.

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