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I think journalism is useful training for a writer in the way it takes the preciousness out of the pragmatic side of the craft.

I think you can do a lot with fiction, and in some cases you can say even more in fiction than you can in straight-up documentary journalism.

If you imagine writing 1,000 words a day, which most journalists do, that would be a very long book a year. I don't manage nearly that... but I have published slightly too much recently.

From journalism I learned to write under pressure, to work with deadlines, to have limited space and time, to conduct and interview, to find information, to research, and above all, to use language as efficiently as possible and to remember always that there is a reader out there.

I see journalists as the manual workers, the laborers of the word. Journalism can only be literature when it is passionate.

Journalism is literature in a hurry.

Being a journalist, you write what you see. If we can't do that, what use are we? I turned years of training on myself.

Journalism allows its readers to witness history; fiction gives its readers an opportunity to live it.

My training as a journalist was invaluable: when I worked on 'The Daily Express,' the editor would often ask for 1000 words within a couple of hours. I could not say I was not inspired. I had to get on with it.

A petty reason perhaps why novelists more and more try to keep a distance from journalists is that novelists are trying to write the truth and journalists are trying to write fiction.