David Remnick Quotes & Sayings

“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.”

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

“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.”

“Nature is cold, wet, hard and unforgiving.”

“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.”

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

“I actually have great hopes for the future.”

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

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

“Not all political prisoners are innocents.”