Quotes from Michael Wolff

Fame, in Trumpian fashion, is war. You are expected to defend your fame; many people want to take it from you.

Long-running scandal fuels targeted political media. It's the stuff of obsession, which is the basis of a passionate core audience. More obsession means more passion and a crazy, over-the-top audience. Equally, of course, this obsession leads to less soberness, moderation and disinterest in the media world.

Politics is ultimately not that complicated a profession; it's where the mediocre distinguish themselves.

What's wrong with politics in the celebrity billionaire analysis is politicians. Populism is not so much a cry for economic equality, or even a disdain for elites, but a mass revulsion against the inauthenticity of politicians. Celebrities are real celebrities, politicians are fake ones.

I am old enough to think the word 'journalist' is not all that noble a designation. Journalist - that record keeper, quote taker and processor of press releases - was, in the world of letters I grew up in, a lower-down job. To be a writer - once the ambition of every journalist - was to be the greater truth teller.

Cable television is basically now the business of former political professionals. Joe Scarborough, a former Florida Congressman, is a far more successful cable host than he ever was a politician.

Donald Trump is a family man.

Many of the accounts of what has happened in the Trump White House are in conflict with one another; many, in Trumpian fashion, are baldly untrue.

This American right to bear arms with, practically, a Muslim fierceness, sometimes seems as if it must be age-old, an ancient tradition from a tenacious frontier holdover.

A President of the United States cannot restrain anything from publication.

Galling for left-wing activists and the mainstream media's bottom line - in its way as galling as Fox's daily agitprop - was the fact that liberal media did not have the talent or the savvy or the passion to match conservative media's success.

During my many hours on the Acela, I have taken to watching 'The West Wing,' Aaron Sorkin's drama of an idealised White House.

All politicians, no matter how gifted, ultimately depend on circumstances for their success.

At a particularly dicey moment in my own love life when I was interviewing Rupert Murdoch a number of years ago, I tried to get some advice from him about, well, about anything a man with three wives, the latest the age of his children, might offer.

A particular modern problem is that megalomania, especially when it involves real estate development, is the disturbance of many faceless men. And a faceless man is a difficult enemy.

I have written periodically for the Guardian for more than a decade.

Guns in America have an atavistic force. Possessing them, or the act of not possessing them, is an identity that seems to pass from father to son.

Reality television is to television what marble and gold are to real estate. The point is to dispense with the idea of taste. It's all id. The more unrestrained the better. We all know that 'reality' in reality television is not real. That anybody who would participate in reality television is a fake. But pretending otherwise makes them real.

Next to financial impropriety, being charged with a reckless pursuit of women is certainly the most damaging thing you can accuse a public person of.

I work like every journalist works so I have recordings, I have notes.

Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and George W Bush (and, in their image, Tony Blair) bitterly annoyed their antagonists because they were - at least until the Iraq war caught up with Blair and Bush - Teflon. David Cameron is in this model.

For decades, Trump had no life independent from the media. He became a figure in the nation, and his a monitisable name - albeit quite a ludicrous one - because of his nonstop, relentless, shameless and often embarrassing courtship of the media.

Rusbridger's curious success, especially for a temperamentally remote figure, has been to give a reasonable face to the Guardian's quite quixotic mission.

I've said many times: I'm not a Washington reporter.