David Remnick

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

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

“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.”

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

“98% of the people who get the magazine say they read the cartoons first - and the other 2% are lying.”

“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 have to always remember, writing is really hard.”

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

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

“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.”

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

“I'm not the slowest writer that you know.”

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

“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.”

“I actually have great hopes for the future.”

“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.”

“I'm a civilian, a citizen.”