David Remnick Quotes.
Everybody has a cartoon of themselves. Mine is: I write very fast, and I’m ruthlessly efficient with my time.
I understand the difference between journalism and scholarship that comes 20 years later.
I’m a civilian, a citizen.
On Facebook, a lie can seem as convincing to some as an article from SPIEGEL or the Washington Post. That’s a problem. I can then like it and like it again and start creating my own media universe, both for me and for my friends, and so we become more and more fenced off from one another.
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.
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.
Reform is not a period of retreat.
We should put pressure on power and write the truth and write relentlessly and fearlessly. That’s the job.
The Cold War was wildly expensive and consumed the entire globe.
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.
The only reason to be in business is to be great.
The Communist Party apparatus was the most gigantic mafia the world has ever known.
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.
You know what writers say about their long books: If I had another year, the book would be half as long.
Capitalism in Russia has spawned far more Al Capones than Henry Fords.
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 have to do our jobs better, more tirelessly and stop whining about it.
Not all political prisoners are innocents.
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.
Very rarely is there a spike in news-stand sales.
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.
Being an editor it’s a complicated job, but the last impression I’d want anybody to have is that it’s onerous. It’s a joy – a complicated joy, but a joy.
We can hope that the responsibilities and realities will weigh on Donald Trump and he will not be the president we fear, but rather something more stable.
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.
I’m a journalist – I’m not Robert Caro. I have a day job, and a pretty consuming one – a joyfully consuming one.
