David Remnick
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.Collection: Beauty
Nature is cold, wet, hard and unforgiving.Collection: Nature
I left Gorbachev's office thinking that everything about him was outsized: his achievements, his mistakes, and, now, his vanity and bitterness.
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 actually have great hopes for the future.
98% of the people who get the magazine say they read the cartoons first - and the other 2% are lying.
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.
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.
Reform is not a period of retreat.
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.
Capitalism in Russia has spawned far more Al Capones than Henry Fords.
Not all political prisoners are innocents.
Clearly independent journalists - domestic journalists - run a high risk if they dare to take on serious investigative work.
You know what writers say about their long books: If I had another year, the book would be half as long.
I have to always remember, writing is really hard.
I'm a journalist - I'm not Robert Caro. I have a day job, and a pretty consuming one - a joyfully consuming one.
I understand the difference between journalism and scholarship that comes 20 years later.
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.
The Cold War was wildly expensive and consumed the entire globe.
Everybody has a cartoon of themselves. Mine is: I write very fast, and I'm ruthlessly efficient with my time.
I'm not the slowest writer that you know.
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.
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.
I think dealing with the U.S. Senate is very different from dealing with the electorate.
I'm a civilian, a citizen.
Very rarely is there a spike in news-stand sales.
To some extent, the mainstream's absence means the Tea Party is the Republican Party.
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.Collection: Pressure
The only reason to be in business is to be great.Collection: Reason
We should put pressure on power and write the truth and write relentlessly and fearlessly. That's the job.Collection: Jobs
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.Collection: One Day
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.Collection: Joy
Disaster can take a nation by surprise, slowly, and then all at once.Collection: Surprise
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.Collection: Fun
Donald Trump's temperament and character is precisely what you would hate to see in your children, much less your president.Collection: Children
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.Collection: Graduation
The notion that somehow through a trade war or protectionism or magical thinking that we're going to return to a romanticized economic past is, in the end, going to be an illusion. And a severe disappointment to millions of decent, hard-working people.Collection: Disappointment
I don't know that Donald Trump is anything more to Putin than what Lenin called a poleznye durak, a useful idiot.Collection: Idiot
The Communist Party apparatus was the most gigantic mafia the world has ever known.Collection: Party
100% of the people who get the magazine say they read the cartoons first - and the other 2% are lying.100Collection: Lying
Maybe Santa Claus is real. Here's the problem: reality.Collection: Real
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.Collection: Lying
I would also like to see Russia not interfere in our elections.Collection: Russia
I think we should be alarmed, watchful, and, as journalists, rigorous and fearless. I think we should be alert.Collection: Thinking
Mobile is great for us. I think, even though the size of the screen doesn't give everything The New Yorker has to offer, people are spending a lot of time reading - and reading seriously - on the phone.Collection: Reading
I use social media every day. I don't have a Twitter account, but not because I'm a dinosaur about it. I have enough of a platform here. People in my position who do it tend to use it in a promotional way or in a hamstrung way. I look at Twitter all the time as a news tool or for cultural conversation. I've used it in my reporting. It's very useful.Collection: People
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.Collection: Giving
I am an adult; deliberately naïve, dewy-eyed optimism is not the proper posture for a responsible adult, is it?Collection: Optimism
We have to do our jobs better, more tirelessly and stop whining about it.Collection: Jobs
Speaking to the subject is the most overrated thing in journalism.Collection: Journalism