A Quote by Aminatta Forna
I get a very vague idea and - perhaps because I once was a journalist, or perhaps because that's what made me want to be a journalist - I go off and explore it for a bit, rather than mapping out a plot and then filling in the research.
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'All the President's Men' is a movie that has a very personal place for me because it made me want to be a journalist, and then it made me want to be a filmmaker.
While I love to read contemporary fiction, I'm not drawn to writing it. Perhaps it's because the former journalist in me is too inhibited by the press of reality; when I think about writing of my own time I always think about nonfiction narratives. Or perhaps it's just that I find the present too confounding.
If you're a journalist - and I think, on some level, I'm a journalist, and proud to be a journalist, or a documentarian, however you want to describe it - part of what I do has to be the pursuit of the truth.
I think BBC3 gave me my first commissions because I wasn't a middle-class, highbrow journalist. I was able to speak to the contributors on a level that perhaps some journalists don't.
There's something very strange about associating me with that prize. I had hoped for it in a more directed way as a journalist. Somehow as a journalist you know there are Pulitzers out there and you can work hard and get one. To win it for Fiction seems unbelievable.
I realize that Facebook today is a global success with more than 600 million users worldwide. But I also understand, maybe a bit sadly, that it is not for me. Perhaps it is because I am a bit too old? Or perhaps it is because I am more interested in exploring the epic text, which I have lived with for all my life.
The one thing that shaped my life was when I was 15 or 16: I knew I wanted to be a journalist. And not just a journalist, but a journalist in the Middle East, and to go back to the Arab world and try to understand what it meant to be Lebanese.
If anybody ever tries to do an investigative report on a journalist, much like the kind and the way a journalist would do on a public figure, have you ever seen a stuck pig? Because that's what the journalist looks like.
Perhaps your quest to be part of building something great will not fall in your business life. But find it somewhere. If not in corporate life, then perhaps in making your church great. If not there, then perhaps a nonprofit, or a community organization, or a class you teach. Get involved in something that you care so much about that you want to make it the greatest it can possibly be, not because of what you will get, but just because it can be done.
When a critic or journalist writes, 'It's too complex,' or, 'It's full of plot holes,' they very rarely take the step of identifying what they mean. The reason they do that is to protect themselves, because they don't want to reveal that they may have misunderstood or missed something.
I'd rather the handshake for somebody that I can trust than a contract. Because you can read the bloody contract - perhaps if you made a little bit of a mistake writing it - in a way to suit you.
Ownership is not limited to material things. It can also apply to points of view. Once we take ownership of an idea - whether it’s about politics or sports - what do we do? We love it perhaps more than we should. We prize it more than it is worth. And most frequently, we have trouble letting go of it because we can’t stand the idea of its loss. What are we left with then? An ideology - rigid and unyielding.
Journalism has been very important for me - for a long time I made my living as a journalist, and it also serves as a source of ideas. Many of the things I have written I would not have written without the experience of being a journalist.
I am old enough to think the word 'journalist' is not all that noble a designation. Journalist - that record keeper, quote taker and processor of press releases - was, in the world of letters I grew up in, a lower-down job. To be a writer - once the ambition of every journalist - was to be the greater truth teller.
Not the challenges necessarily, but the way in which you get ready because your technique has improved over the years and you perhaps know how to be more economical than perhaps you used to be when you tried to work perhaps too hard.
It was a challenge for me to do a plot because I'd been an essayist and a journalist. I had to be vigilant about moving things along and being entertaining.
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