A Quote by Nat Hentoff

If [Bill Shawn] liked the piece, then he would run it. But he wanted the magazine to be something that was more than just a weekly event. And as a result you could pick up a New Yorker under him, as I mentioned before, a year from then or 10 years or 20 years and there would always be something worth reading in it.
I just so desperately wanted to be published in New Yorker, and I'd so desperately try to get something in it. But I'd always get nice letters back telling me that Mr. Shawn [William Shawn, the New Yorker's editor from 1952 to 1987] just didn't like this or didn't like that about what I submitted.
Clay Felker was then - he had - to his credit, he had created New York Magazine, which was the first of the city magazines that covered the city and gave all kinds of advice and all that sort of stuff. And there were copies all over the country by the time he left. He had, however, a view of journalism that was very much, I must say, like Tina Brown's at The New Yorker. You hit 'em hard, fast, give 'em something to talk about the day after the paper comes out, as contrasted with William Shawn, who gave them something to talk about two or three years from then.
If you were a kid in 1955, you would pick up a copy of 'Popular Science' and it would say, 'This is the kind of car you're going to be driving in five years or in 20 years you'll be able to take a jet plane from New York to London in four hours,' or something like that. We actually got used to the idea that the future's going to be different.
The heartbreak that it might not happen wasn't something that I wanted to face with any more weight. Then, when I got the call to go ahead I never thought for a second as I was approaching it who I would get - that would come later. Again, I think the idea was that I now had the rights to make the movie and I can start writing it but if I have to wait another 10 years before I find an actor that's right for it, I'd be very happy to do that.
William Shawn was the editor of The New Yorker and for whom I worked for, God, 27 years; a man I respected enormously because of what he did, - what the magazine was about.
You can put a person in jail for 5 years, for 10 years, or 20 years, for the same crime. We're deciding on 10 years to 20 years, when 5 years would be enough. Okay. The deterrent value, the additional amount of leverage that you get over a criminal to keep them from breaking the law in the first place, associated with making the sentences longer, is de minimous; it's essentially nothing.
People ask me 'Why you want to do another magazine - 10 years at 'Vogue,' a great magazine? Why do you want to make a new one? It's so difficult and there's already so many.' I wanted to do something new, bring a new vision.
I worked seven years in territories in Japan and Puerto Rico and worked my way up to the main events on those cards, then went to the WWF and spent a little while there before I got into the Intercontinental run and a main event runs with Shawn Michaels and Kevin Nash.
I would just say that if Governor Romney would like to give back all the money he’s earned from bankrupting companies and laying off employees over his years at Bain that I would be glad to then listen to him. I’ll bet you $10, not $10,000, that he won’t take the offer.
I would do the morning show and then just walk over to the network side of the building here at ABC in New York and sit down and start it up again and introduce the 10 contestants, and then introduce the 10 - the fastest finger question, and pick one of them, put them in the seat before you finally got to asking them the questions.
The Canon AE1 - a fully manual camera. [My mother] had a 50mm, which is a standard lens, and then I got a 28mm. Then I started a little punk magazine, a zine, when I was 14 or 15 years old. I was shooting my friends skateboarding and it was the beginning of the Macintosh. We wouldn't do layouts on the computer; we would pick the font and then type up a paragraph and then print it out and cut it up and put it in a little mock-up and Xerox it.
I've had two great years, probably five good years. So I had 20 years of just kind of uncertainty and suffering and ego destruction and poverty. All these things. There's no way I'm ever going to catch up to the misery years. It's impossible... If I don't do anything dumb or I don't get a disease or something, and then I've got to five to eight years I think where it'll really be great and then it will start to degenerate like uranium, you know?
I grew up in this household where reading was the most noble thing you could do. When I was a teenager, we would have family dinners where we all sat there reading. It wasn't because we didn't like each other. We just liked reading. The person who made my reading list until my late teen years was my mom.
[Bill Shawn] had always been in The New Yorker immaculately dressed - quietly, immaculately dressed, very soft-spoken. On the phone I could hardly hear him sometimes.
Baseball players tend to have something like 20 good years in them and then around their mid-thirties they aren't in the same shape as the young guys in the league and kind of aren't worth as much. Then they retire before 40. And they are left floating adrift in the middle of the ocean.
I sometimes feel that if your book sells more than 20 years, then there's something in it that you can say, gee, I did something that endures, that's timeless.
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