"See, I have no journalism in my background, so I wasn't practised at research or writing non-fiction, nor at handling the truth in a journalistic way. Journalists know when to call a halt and write something, but I kept on looking for answers"
About this Quote
Sladek is confessing to a kind of professional maladjustment: he didn’t come up through journalism, so he never learned the craft’s most underrated skill, stopping. The line tilts toward self-mockery, but it’s also a quiet indictment of how “truth” gets packaged in public life. Journalism, in his telling, isn’t just fact-finding; it’s deadline-driven triage. You don’t discover the whole story, you decide when you have enough of it to ship.
The subtext is that narrative discipline can look suspiciously like epistemic surrender. “Handling the truth in a journalistic way” implies a set of conventions that tame reality into something publishable: a lead that implies causality, a quote that stands in for complexity, an ending that lands even if the world doesn’t. Sladek positions himself as the person who can’t accept those guardrails, who keeps pulling at the loose thread because fiction trained him to treat unanswered questions as the point, not the problem. The irony is sharp: the novelist claims to be less equipped to “handle the truth,” while suggesting that journalists, the supposed truth professionals, are structurally incentivized to stop short.
Context matters here: Sladek wrote in a postwar, Cold War media ecosystem where certainty was often performed, not earned, and where science, bureaucracy, and punditry produced authoritative-sounding answers at industrial speed. His remark defends the obsessive researcher as a moral posture. It also hints at why his kind of writer gravitates toward satire and speculative fiction: when reality arrives pre-digested, the most honest response might be to refuse the neat ending.
The subtext is that narrative discipline can look suspiciously like epistemic surrender. “Handling the truth in a journalistic way” implies a set of conventions that tame reality into something publishable: a lead that implies causality, a quote that stands in for complexity, an ending that lands even if the world doesn’t. Sladek positions himself as the person who can’t accept those guardrails, who keeps pulling at the loose thread because fiction trained him to treat unanswered questions as the point, not the problem. The irony is sharp: the novelist claims to be less equipped to “handle the truth,” while suggesting that journalists, the supposed truth professionals, are structurally incentivized to stop short.
Context matters here: Sladek wrote in a postwar, Cold War media ecosystem where certainty was often performed, not earned, and where science, bureaucracy, and punditry produced authoritative-sounding answers at industrial speed. His remark defends the obsessive researcher as a moral posture. It also hints at why his kind of writer gravitates toward satire and speculative fiction: when reality arrives pre-digested, the most honest response might be to refuse the neat ending.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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