David Remnick Quotations

I left Gorbachev's office thinking that everything about him was outsized: his achievements, his mistakes, and, now, his vanity and bitterness.

The world is a crazy, beautiful, ugly complicated place, and it keeps moving on from crisis to strangeness to beauty to weirdness to tragedy. The caravan keeps moving on, and the job of the longform writer or filmmaker or radio broadcaster is to stop - is to pause - and when the caravan goes away, that's when this stuff comes.

The Cold War was wildly expensive and consumed the entire globe.

There is no single field of activity, not a single institution, free of the most brutal sort of corruption. Russia has bred a world-class mafia.

Everybody has a cartoon of themselves. Mine is: I write very fast, and I'm ruthlessly efficient with my time.

Russian is such a tough and complex language that I am happy enough to understand everything and read most things pretty well, but, without constant practice, my speech is not what I wish it was, and I would sooner write in crayon than write a letter in Russian.

I actually have great hopes for the future.

I understand the difference between journalism and scholarship that comes 20 years later.

I'm not the slowest writer that you know.

If the story is good enough, if it's imaginative enough, if it's moving enough it is going to reach deeper than the level of sheer information and change somebody's life two degrees. That is an enormous achievement.

Clearly independent journalists - domestic journalists - run a high risk if they dare to take on serious investigative work.

Capitalism in Russia has spawned far more Al Capones than Henry Fords.

I'm a journalist - I'm not Robert Caro. I have a day job, and a pretty consuming one - a joyfully consuming one.

Most magazines have peak moments. They live on, they do just okay, or they die. 'The New Yorker' has had a very different kind of existence.

To some extent, the mainstream's absence means the Tea Party is the Republican Party.

I have to always remember, writing is really hard.

Very rarely is there a spike in news-stand sales.

I'm interested in Russian language, culture, history... and I lived there, for four years, as a reporter for the Washington Post and have visited many times since.

You know what writers say about their long books: If I had another year, the book would be half as long.

If this day means anything, it means that you are now in the contingent of the responsible. You must be kind, yes, but you must also look beyond your own house. We're depending on you for your efforts and your vision. We are depending on your eye and your imagination to identify what wrongs exist and persist, and on your hands, your backs, your efforts, to right them.

Speaking to the subject is the most overrated thing in journalism,

I think dealing with the U.S. Senate is very different from dealing with the electorate.

Not all political prisoners are innocents.

Nature is cold, wet, hard and unforgiving.

A.J. Liebling, one of my heroes, used to say that he could write better than anyone who wrote faster, and faster than anyone who could write better. I'm one nine-hundredth as good as Liebling, but that principle may slightly apply.

What about our refusal to look squarely at the degradation of the planet we inhabit? In the last election cycle many candidates refused even to acknowledge the hard science, irrefutable science, of climate change. The president, while readily accepting the facts, has done far too little to alter them. How long are we, are you, prepared to wait?

Every good journalist is aware that his trade may one day go the way of phrenology-and, what's more, the population will hardly protest the extinction.

100% of the people who get the magazine say they read the cartoons first - and the other 2% are lying.100

The future is itself a story, and predictions are stories we tell to amaze ourselves, to give hope to the desperate, to jolt the complacent.

I got in journalism for any number of reasons, not least because it's so much fun. Journalism should be in the business of putting pressure on power, finding out the truth, of shining a light on injustice, of, when appropriate, being amusing and entertaining - it's a complicated and varied beast, journalism.

The Communist Party apparatus was the most gigantic mafia the world has ever known.

Journalism, some huge percentage of it, should be devoted to putting pressure on power, on nonsense, on chicanery of all kinds and if that's going to invite a lawsuit, well, bring it on.

She shaped American film criticism for generations to come and, more important, the national understanding of the movies,

I think dealing with the U.S. Senate is very different from dealing with the electorate.

My time as editor has been overlapped by a crisis - a prolonged, labyrinthine, tragic, seemingly non-ending crisis - that involves the prehistory of 9/11, 9/11, Iraq, Afghanistan, fraught histories between the United States and almost everyone.

We don't assign stories based on gender, but now that Ruth Davis Konigsberg has helpfully shown us the error of our ways, henceforth all assignments will be equally balanced between the sexes.

What stores are around, what stores aren't around, what advertisers want to present as an ideal woman or man, passing prejudices, things that you would never say now that you could say then.

Washington as a Surveyor. We should have been clearer.

Bill Buford has been one of the great fiction editors in the history of the magazine, bringing into our pages countless new voices, ... He has an intelligence and an imagination that has made itself known in the magazine all the time, and I know he will do that, too, as a writer.

There's no doubt that Ali wrote a great deal of what he recited.

The sense of urgency, the sense of moment, has arrived.

Ads are ads, and I have no problem at all with Target's advertising a lot, all at once, or a page at a time.

I've grown up on Woody's movies and his prose,

He's an important writer for The New Yorker, in the same way Robert Benchley and S.J. Perelman were important.

A.J. Liebling, one of my heroes, used to say that he could write better than anyone who wrote faster, and faster than anyone who could write better. I'm one nine-hundredth as good as Liebling, but that principle may slightly apply.

The Complete New Yorker: Eighty Years of the Nation's Greatest Magazine,