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Truth is stranger than nonfiction. And life is too interesting to be left to journalists. People have stories, but journalists have 'takes,' and it's their takes that usually win out when the stories are too complicated or, as happens, not complicated enough.

I think that if journalists, reporters who spend a lot of time on a story, are honest with themselves, we all have feelings about our subjects - I mean, unless you're a robot.

If you're a writer, you know there are ways in which we don't know what we're doing at all. We're working out mysteries in a sort of poetic realm, and hoping that if a story is honest, if you're dragging the deep truth out of yourself, then something good and profound might come out of it.

Well, to be honest I think I tell less truth when I write journalism than when I write fiction.

Sometimes, in a fictional story, you can be more honest and truthful, actually. As a journalist, you're a prisoner of the data, in effect. You have to tell the story with evidence you can verify.

We who are interested in relative truth have to keep digging for it and not let ourselves be sucked under.

It's a journalist's job to be a witness to history. We're not there to worry about ourselves. We're there to try and get as near as we can, in an imperfect world, to the truth and get the truth out.

As a reporter you tend to seek coherence from your subject or your source - it all needs to add up and make sense. In truth, in reality, there's often a great deal of murkiness and muddiness, confusion and contradiction.

I think the key to being a journalist is getting your subject to feel comfortable enough to talk about stuff they want to talk about and the stuff they like and don't like, and still feel comfortable about it.