Graydon Carter Quotes

In this age of 24-7 headlines, the term ‘newsweekly’ seems almost quaint.

As a father of five, I sometimes feel I’ve spent a lifetime watching Disney musicals.

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.

To a young kid growing up in Canada, America seemed to be crazy about the future; dazzled by it.

In America, the top 1 percent led the country into war and economic devastation, leaving the less fortunate to fight for one and pay for both.

Television offers a range and scope, and a degree of creativity and daring, that the bottom-line, global-audience-obsessed, brand-driven movie industry just can’t compete with.

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

There’s probably a half-dozen movie actors I really like. But a lot of them just aren’t that interesting.

My suggestion to newspapers everywhere is to give the public a reason to read them again. So here’s an idea: get on a big story with widespread public appeal, devote your best resources to it, say a quiet prayer, and swing for the fences.

You lose manufacturing jobs, you rarely ever get them back again.

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.

Many of the architects of the Vietnam War became near pariahs as they spent the remainder of their lives in the futile quest to explain away their decisions at the time.

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.

I’m losing my hair. I’m overweight. It’s not like that’s at the top of the list when women go looking for a man. It’s like – complete collapse, every year.

We admire elephants in part because they demonstrate what we consider the finest human traits: empathy, self-awareness, and social intelligence. But the way we treat them puts on display the very worst of human behavior.

Conservatives define themselves more by their hatred of liberals than anything else, and, conversely, liberals by their distaste for conservatives.

As you get older and fatter, good clothes can hide a lot.

We really care about photography at ‘Vanity Fair.’

Let’s face it, who among us wouldn’t take a pill or potion that would make us better at our job? Goodness knows, we abuse substances for just about everything in our personal lives; why not in our professional lives as well?

People think they have to be ambitious. But at a certain age, all you want is to be around nice, decent people.

I always thought eating what you wanted was one of those aspects of adulthood to be looked forward to when you were a child.

‘The Guardian,’ with its deep journalistic traditions, is careful about context and explanation. It sees itself as a gatekeeper, and it worries about consequences.

Issues such as transparency often boil down to which side of – pick a number – 40 you’re on. Under 40, and transparency is generally considered a good thing for society. Over 40, and one generally chooses privacy over transparency. On every side of this issue, hypocrisy abounds.

Satire works best when it hews close to the line between the outlandish and the possible – and as that line continues to grow thinner, the satirist’s task becomes ever more difficult.

In the Digital Age, recorders also tend to be oversharers, and with Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest, they can do so on a grand scale.

As someone who came to New York in the 1970s, I was, like so many of my friends, a certified member of what we now call the 99 percent – and I was a lot closer to the bottom than to the top of that 99 percent. At some point during the intervening years, I moved into the 1 percent.

To discuss a Martin Amis book, you must first discuss the orchestrated release of a Martin Amis book. In London, which rightly prides itself on the vibrancy of its literary cottage industry, Amis is the Steve Jobs of book promoters, and his product rollouts are as carefully managed as anything Apple dreams up.

‘Green‘ does not have to mean the sort of hair-shirt, wood-burning-stove sensibility of the ’70s. Green can and should be sleek and modern.

Life is all about seating and lighting.

The shelf life of a movie actor or actress is so short, it’s like milk.

It’s estimated that across Africa 100 elephants are killed for their tusks every day. It takes nothing more than simple math to get to what that adds up to in a year, and it’s a distressing figure.

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.

Everything I love about America is fragile.

In 2004, I wrote ‘What We’ve Lost,’ a book about the Bush administration. It sold only reasonably well, in part, I think, because the book was a horrific downer, an unrelenting account of the administration’s actions, bungles, deceptions, half-truths, untruths, and downright corruptions.

Financial institutions like to call what they do trading. Let’s be honest. It’s not trading; it’s betting.

I did a bunch of blue-collar jobs, because I knew I’d wind up with a white-collar job at some point, and I wanted to, I don’t know, I just wanted to taste life. I dug graves for a while, I worked as a stock boy in a big department store, I worked in a bank.

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

I don’t do any research. It’s all about gut. Editing – it’s always about gut.

My hunch is that pop culture began to stagnate the moment Americans started to love the past more than they did the future.

Television has the obvious benefits of regularity and intimacy.

There aren’t any looks or customs I wish would come back. Today almost anything goes. Culture constantly devours the past so there’s not much that’s missing.

Take a random selection of photographs of America in 2012 and 2002 and 1992 and, except for the skinny jeans and the porkpie hats, you’ll be hard-pressed to tell the years in which the pictures were taken.

I have always thought you could take the measure of a man by his sports manners – that is to say, the way in which he conducts himself on the playing field, or even over a game of chess or cards.

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

What do you call an electorate that seems prone to acting out irrationally, is full of inchoate rage, and is constantly throwing fits and tantrums? You call it teenaged.

Magazines at some point become hostage to their own success.

Cod is more responsible for the discovery of the New World than almost anything else. Drove the Vikings across the North Atlantic, and John Cabot discovered America by looking for cod.

Fashion is a dangerous road to go down. Anybody who is going to have children later in life had best not be too fashionable because the photos will come back to haunt them.

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.

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.

Many men think they’re playboys, but they invariably land wide of the mark. Surrounding yourself with champagne, fast friends, and paid escorts is the very definition of the word ‘loser.’

The fact is that movie stars are as insecure as the rest of us – if not more so. Many live in a luxurious bubble in which their best friends are their trainer, their hairdresser, their publicist, and their Kabbalah instructor.

As any journalist will tell you, there are few professional situations as vexing as when a friend becomes involved in a major story that you feel you must cover.

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.

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.

It could fairly be said that the U.S. is increasingly out of step with the rest of the world. As our neighbors to the south elect left-wing or even socialist governments, we are lurching further to the right. As Europe becomes less engaged to the Church, we are becoming more fundamentalist.

The last thing businessmen want to do is sit in a room filled with other businessmen. A room full of money is a pretty boring sight – unless it’s yours, of course.

I think Americans, more so than any other culture, love second and third acts.

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.

Moping is an unattractive attribute in a man.