Quotes from Graydon Carter

I might wear a dinner jacket once a year to our Oscar party - that's a big thing - but I don't go to parties. I'm social but I'm not a socialite person.

Those who remember New York in the 1970s, as I do, look back on a city that had hit a very rough patch - decaying, bankrupt, and crime-ridden. But fun.

We really care about photography at 'Vanity Fair.'

A workday lunch that lasts as long as a transcontinental flight is an impossibility for all but the most pliant and footloose of food tourists. To get in the game, you need a thick wallet, an adventurous palate, and a whole lot of time.

Former vice president Al Gore has devoted his post-administration years to a mission to tell the world about global warming. It's funny, but in his civilian life Gore has discovered the voice that voters had trouble hearing when he ran for president in 2000. The voice he has found is clear, impassioned, and moving.

Americans who grew up in the 1930s or 1940s still have some fleeting memory of what the country was like before it became the steroidal superpower it is today.

Every man in the back of their minds would like to own a bar or a racehorse.

After the collapse of Wall Street in the 1920s, the culture stopped being all about money, and the country survived and ultimately flourished.

You know, I used to warm the thermometer on the light bulb... I was really good at being sick. I could forge my mother's signature on a sick note so well I was hardly ever at school.

In less than a year, the Bush administration will strut out of office, leaving the country in roughly the same condition a toddler leaves a diaper.

Christopher Hitchens was a wit, a charmer, and a troublemaker, and to those who knew him well, he was a gift from - dare I say it - God.

The fact is, unlike a lot of writers, I credit the people who help me. A lot of writers out there have a ton of researchers and they don't get credited in the book.

I don't think you can be a credible, modern candidate for president without making the environment a major part of your platform.

It's no surprise that the Bush administration's bullying swagger and blithe ignorance have caused much of the Muslim world to hold the U.S. in rock-bottom regard.

The danger of leaving overwhelming wealth and power in the grasp of a small minority is a lesson that leaders such as ousted Tunisian president Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali and deposed Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak have learned a little too late, as the demonstrations across the Arab world indicate.

History is nothing if not an epic tale of missed opportunities.

New York has arguably become the quintessential 1 percent city, a city that has been so given over to the rich that you now have to be rich to live here. Or not live here: New York's also a preferred destination for foreign money spent on vast, lifeless apartments in the sky that are occupied a couple of weeks a year at most.

There is a certain ancient civility about tailors that is welcome - especially in modern London, which is now very much an international city, not an English city. They're still a little vessel of Englishness in what is otherwise a pretty rambunctious place.

I really don't despise anyone. But there is a list of a half dozen people I would prefer never to hear from or see again.

The greatest thing that prepared me for editing 'Vanity Fair' was having four kids because you just learn to subjugate your ego with the greater interest in mind.

Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi looks in the mirror and sees a playboy of the old school. And men such as Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Charlie Sheen no doubt look at Berlusconi and think, 'Role model!' Women, of course, know otherwise. They see him as an aging, pathetic buffoon.

I actually don't know how magazines are produced, I'll be honest with you. I have no idea.

Branding experts believe that just because they have rethought a company's image or name, the rest of us will automatically fall in line.

It could fairly be said that America, during the Bush years, has entered an Age of Denial - arguably the first stage of a nation's decline.