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

The Communist Party apparatus was the most gigantic mafia the world has ever known.

You have to understand that a lot of the working class is not white.

We have to do our jobs better, more tirelessly and stop whining about it.

The only reason to be in business is to be great.

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.

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.