David Remnick Quotes
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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.
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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.
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Not all political prisoners are innocents.
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Very rarely is there a spike in news-stand sales.
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Nature is cold, wet, hard and unforgiving.
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I'm a civilian, a citizen.
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The Cold War was wildly expensive and consumed the entire globe.
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Clearly independent journalists - domestic journalists - run a high risk if they dare to take on serious investigative work.
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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.
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Reform is not a period of retreat.
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You know what writers say about their long books: If I had another year, the book would be half as long.
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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.
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I'm a journalist - I'm not Robert Caro. I have a day job, and a pretty consuming one - a joyfully consuming one.
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I actually have great hopes for the future.
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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.
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I have to always remember, writing is really hard.
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I understand the difference between journalism and scholarship that comes 20 years later.
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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.
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Capitalism in Russia has spawned far more Al Capones than Henry Fords.
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I think dealing with the U.S. Senate is very different from dealing with the electorate.
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I'm not the slowest writer that you know.
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I left Gorbachev's office thinking that everything about him was outsized: his achievements, his mistakes, and, now, his vanity and bitterness.
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To some extent, the mainstream's absence means the Tea Party is the Republican Party.
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98% of the people who get the magazine say they read the cartoons first - and the other 2% are lying.