Quotes from David Remnick

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

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

Reform is not a period of retreat.

I actually have great hopes for the future.

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.

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.

I'm not the slowest writer that you know.

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

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.

We should put pressure on power and write the truth and write relentlessly and fearlessly. That's the job.

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.

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.

I would love to have a stable, productive relationship with Russia.

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

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

Being an editor it's a complicated job, but the last impression I'd want anybody to have is that it's onerous. It's a joy - a complicated joy, but a joy.

Vladimir Putin wants to become the de facto head of an illiberal, xenophobic, hypernationalist trend in world politics.

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

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.

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

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

As journalists, we need to find every avenue to distribute our work, and try to be so good that we become increasingly more influential than before.