David Remnick's Quotes

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 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.

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

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

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

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

I actually have great hopes for the future.

I have to always remember, writing is really hard.

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

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

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

I'm a civilian, a citizen.

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

I'm not the slowest writer that you know.

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.

Nature is cold, wet, hard and unforgiving.

Not all political prisoners are innocents.

Reform is not a period of retreat.

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.

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

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

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