Quotes from Michael Wolff

One point about understanding Donald Trump is that he is always representing something which has only a casual connection to what he actually is.

Everybody appears to look down on Bieber. No person able to write a grammatical sentence about Justin Bieber actually thinks him worthy of the sentence.

In America, the new post-postmodern politician is all about authenticity: the daffier you are, the 'realer' you must be. The more you have committed yourself to a ridiculous idea and fevered view, the more worthy you are of attention.

Politics, which really is about the art of expression, ought to be a logical profession for writers (it's very hard to explain to politics- and policy-addicted people that language is the basis of all ideas - if you can't say it, you can't think it), instead of a refuge for lawyers and apparatchiks.

In business terms, if you take over a company and oust its CEO or fire a divisional chief, you run the place. But in institutional terms, as it happens, it doesn't at all work that way.

I have never heard the word brand used so often as I did around The Guardian. Brand was the magical word, particularly as it was uttered by Alan Rusbridger, that would transform the paper and the goal that everyone was working toward.

With obvious irony, many of the left-leaning privacy advocates who might cheer Apple's stand against the government's intrusion into its system, are now, as transparency advocates, on the side of the leakers of the Panama Papers.

Every journalism bromide - speaking truth to power, comforting the afflicted, afflicting the powerful - that otherwise would be hopelessly sappy to a journalist of any experience, has become a Twitter grail. The true business of journalism has become obscured because there is really no longer a journalism business.

The most significant social pathology of my youth was the generation gap.

Bieber is the first mega YouTube star, born inexplicably out of a novel and disruptive medium. It has, of course, always been so for pop culture: feverish bubbles, silly novelty acts and disconcerting new forces impose themselves on a reluctant and condescending media.

As the entertainment industry became more corporate and MBA-driven, Harvey Weinstein remained an unreconstructed specimen of the worst and most compelling character traits of a truer Hollywood. Harvey, and in a sense only Harvey, continued to embody the Hollywood self.

Being the governor of New York is a mighty job because of the city of New York. You would not want to be the governor of just upstate.

The rise of Donald Trump established a new ground zero for liberal media, requiring no pretence of balance - better yet, with a kind of political brain haemorrhage, everybody seemed to have lost the ability to be balanced.

One of the annoyances of working for The Guardian is that, obsessed as the organisation is with its digital and social media presence and its own sense of singular importance, editors would militantly try to edit your tweets.

Journalism has become a form of idealism. It is no longer, first and foremost, function, craft, service - it is mission.

As much as any other producer in the modern movie age, Harvey Weinstein has been a subject of media fascination. The grossness, the bullying, the unbridled exercising of personal power, the craven appetites, the awards and his good taste in films fed that fascination.

Trump loves the media. Trump understands the power it has and, accordingly, loves the people who have media power.

Corbyn and Trump don't seem to have anything in common except the assumption on the part of anyone subscribing at any level to the standard thinking that they could never achieve electoral success. They were supposed to doom, if not destroy, their party's future.

Trump is a man who, for better or worse, stands in opposition to the institutions that dominate American political life.

I can hardly tell you how boring it is to interview almost every politician among the multitudes I have ever interviewed (journalists can't say this, because if people knew how boring politicians were they wouldn't read what we write), how dead the conversation feels, how bald, flat, uninteresting the message is.

Edward Snowden copied and leaked information from inside the world's most protected spy agency, and then fled to Russia, but yet, because a small part of the data he expropriated was provided to a news organisation, journalism conventions readily accord him lone whistleblower status.

As a journalist - or as a writer - my obligation is to come as close to the truth as I possibly can. And that's not as close to someone else's truth, but the truth as I see it.

I am in the representational business, a portraitist. I have tried to walk an amused line amid hyperbole, documentary detail, cruel characterisation, occasional affection, some good punchlines and anthropological social insight. It's been a good living.

Unlike financial impropriety, which needs to be proven, a charge of sexual loutishness and aggressiveness in and of itself can finish you off. Does the man match the charge? To be the kind of man who would be accused of being so gross is guilt enough.