David Remnick

I have to always remember, writing is really hard.

Nature is cold, wet, hard and unforgiving.

To some extent, the mainstream's absence means the Tea Party is the Republican Party.

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

I'm a civilian, a citizen.

I think dealing with the U.S. Senate is very different from dealing with the electorate.

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.

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'm not the slowest writer that you know.

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

The Cold War was wildly expensive and consumed the entire globe.

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.

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.

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

I actually have great hopes for the future.

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

Not all political prisoners are innocents.

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

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

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.

Reform is not a period of retreat.

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.

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.

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.