Pastoral Resources

Australia is a huge rest home, where no unwelcome news is ever wafted on to the pages of the worst newspapers in the world.

Leaks and whispers are a daily routine of news-gathering in Washington.

The news is staged, anticipated, reported, analyzed until all interest is wrung from it and abandoned for some new novelty.

Journalism as theater is what TV news is.

I draw a weekly comic strip called Life in Hell, which is syndicated in about 250 newspapers. That's what I did before The Simpsons, and what I plan to do for the rest of my life.

And just when we were at the end of our design process there was the news that the Italian government and the U.S. government had signed an agreement to fly the first Italian astronaut on that flight.

I realized that I had traveled to Havana during what now seems like the childhood of the Cuban Revolution, if you think that Fidel has now been in power for 44 extremely long years. I started looking at the revolution as history, and not as part of the daily news.

What interested me was not news, but appraisal. What I sought was to grasp the flavor of a man, his texture, his impact, what he stood for, what he believed in, what made him what he was and what color he gave to the fabric of his time.

The last copy of the Chicago Daily News I picked up had three crime stories on its front page. But by comparison to the gaudy days, this is small-time stuff. Chicago is as full of crooks as a saw with teeth, but the era when they ruled the city is gone forever.

I was totally absorbed in the real world, the politics, the history, the news, and I just couldn't find my way into the fictional world... When I finally could return to writing the novel, it was in fits and starts.

They called to tell me that I was going to be returning to RAW. I left immediately to run home and tell Jackie. She said, I have some news for you-I'm expecting.

No news is good news.

It was important on The Shipping News to have my house far enough away from each location so I had this time in the morning to think about my shots and still remain open to surprises once I got to the set.

You are welcome to your intellectual pastimes and books and art and newspapers; welcome, too, to your bars and your whisky that only makes me ill. Here am I in the forest, quite content.

And we also read Newsweek, Time and several newspapers.

Political reporters no longer get to decide what's news. The days when a minister gave briefings to a dozen lobby correspondents, and thereby dictated the next day's headlines, are over. Now, a thousand bloggers decide for themselves what is interesting. If enough of them are tickled then, bingo, you're news.

The nicest thing is to open the newspapers and not to find yourself in them.

The pressure to be timely with news has increased every year.

People magazine had been around for a short period of time, but nobody had thought about putting entertainment news on a nightly basis on television.

In a lot of cases, as in Tom and Nicole's case, the tabloids were about to break the story, so they said just let the news out. And they called organizations such as ours.