Top 100 Quotes & Sayings by Michael Wolff - Page 2

In one sense, newspaper editor is an appropriate job for an out-of-work politician; politicians live the news cycle as intensely as editors.

One point about understanding Donald Trump is that he is always representing something which has only a casual connection to what he actually is.

A President of the United States cannot restrain anything from publication.

I'm not a daily reporter. I'm not a newspaper reporter, I'm not a political reporter.

Every journalism bromide - speaking truth to power, comforting the afflicted, afflicting the powerful - that otherwise would be hopelessly sappy to a journalist of any experience, has become a Twitter grail. The true business of journalism has become obscured because there is really no longer a journalism business.

Running for office, or suggesting you might, is no longer about being a politician but being an independent opinion or sensibility entrepreneur. You're looking for an audience to identify with you. Rather than trying to convince a majority of the electorate, you're looking to cull your particular following.

Everybody appears to look down on Bieber. No person able to write a grammatical sentence about Justin Bieber actually thinks him worthy of the sentence.

One of the great business virtues of high publishing was that it was a difficult business to enter. You had to stand for something.

When 'Fire and Fury' came out, I thought Steve Bannon would certainly never speak to me again, and the truth is, he never stopped speaking.

If the president of the United States comes after you, you feel concerned.

Two opposite and instructive figures in U.S. journalism during the Trump years are Gerard Baker, editor of the Wall Street Journal, and Martin Baron, editor of the Washington Post.

The emerging notion of the Eighties was that publicity was a currency. The old view was that if you had a currency - your talent or your product - publicity might draw attention to it. The new view was that publicity in itself, highlighting you, bestowed value.

Journalism has become a form of idealism. It is no longer, first and foremost, function, craft, service - it is mission.

I have written periodically for the Guardian for more than a decade.

Bill de Blasio, for his part, became the mayor of New York, surely the most powerful local political position in the nation, and arguably - after Giuliani and Bloomberg - one with a national base, one with, practically speaking, no job at all. He went from marginal political flotsam and jetsam to extraordinary centrality within a few months time.

Donald Trump has been both a peculiar and characteristic American figure for more than three decades. Inheriting a small New York real-estate development company from his father, he parlayed it not so much into a big real-estate company, but himself into a fantasy of a big real-estate developer.

Bieber is the first mega YouTube star, born inexplicably out of a novel and disruptive medium. It has, of course, always been so for pop culture: feverish bubbles, silly novelty acts and disconcerting new forces impose themselves on a reluctant and condescending media.

Many of the accounts of what has happened in the Trump White House are in conflict with one another; many, in Trumpian fashion, are baldly untrue.

Trump's election was dispiriting and confounding to most traditional political players - perhaps nobody more so than Murdoch. Still, Murdoch did what he has always done: made sure he had maximum influence with the new president.

I think Bob Woodward's books are important books.

I am old enough to think the word 'journalist' is not all that noble a designation. Journalist - that record keeper, quote taker and processor of press releases - was, in the world of letters I grew up in, a lower-down job. To be a writer - once the ambition of every journalist - was to be the greater truth teller.

I am in the representational business, a portraitist. I have tried to walk an amused line amid hyperbole, documentary detail, cruel characterisation, occasional affection, some good punchlines and anthropological social insight. It's been a good living.

Cable television is basically now the business of former political professionals. Joe Scarborough, a former Florida Congressman, is a far more successful cable host than he ever was a politician.

As a journalist - or as a writer - my obligation is to come as close to the truth as I possibly can. And that's not as close to someone else's truth, but the truth as I see it.

Being the governor of New York is a mighty job because of the city of New York. You would not want to be the governor of just upstate.

I mean, can Donald Trump get elected again in 2020 without Steve Bannon? I would say no.

If institutions don't grow, they... well, I don't know what happens to them, because they always grow. I suppose the point is that we forget about the ones that don't.

It's not implausible that Donald Trump could have been a successful President.

How advertising is handled has always been a key distinction between low and high order publishing. The higher you stood, the more separate you were from advertising, and, in the logic of snobbery, the greater a premium price the top brands would pay to be in your company.

There was, when I came to New York in the 1970s, no more profound or moving experience than MoMA, an almost perfect piece of 20th Century modernist expression, existing in an extraordinary balance - modestly, functionally, elegantly - with the extraordinary art it held. This place changed my life. I was transformed by every visit.

I work like every journalist works so I have recordings, I have notes.

One of the anomalies of digital journalism is a lack of clarity between high and low. That's the historic distinction in publishing, mass from class, the vulgar from the refined, tabloid from broadsheet, the penny press from papers costing a nickel.

I've said many times: I'm not a Washington reporter.

Fame, in Trumpian fashion, is war. You are expected to defend your fame; many people want to take it from you.

Donald Trump doesn't necessarily stay mad for very long. He's a transactional guy. If you can offer him something, he will take it. Or from a salesman's point of view, if he's not making the sale, you're of no use to him. But if you suddenly come back into the showroom and are willing to buy, he's willing to sell.

If you run for president and lose, you promote yourself into all sorts of more lucrative, possibly more influential and surely more fun media opportunities.

The Steve Bannon I know - I locate Steve's politics as a Democrat circa 1962.

Here's a certainty: When you play out your personal dramas, hurt and self-interest in the media, it's a confection. You say what you have to say in the way you have to say it to give it media currency - and that's always far from the truth. Often, in fact, someone else says it for you. It's all planned. It's all rehearsed.

A particular modern problem is that megalomania, especially when it involves real estate development, is the disturbance of many faceless men. And a faceless man is a difficult enemy.

If you are identified with certain opinions and an ability to express them, and if you can build yourself an audience, a partisan fan base - measured through social media - then you are an official opinionator, monetizable through books, television contracts and the speaking circuit.