Graydon Carter > Quotes

“In less than a year, the Bush administration will strut out of office, leaving the country in roughly the same condition a toddler leaves a diaper.”
― Graydon Carter

“Lobster-both-ways is popular tonight. The preparation is easy enough. Take a two-pound lobster. Kill it with a sharp chef’s knife straight between the eyes. Remove the claw and knuckle meat. Steam for five minutes, chop into salad with aioli, celery, and lots of shallots and chives. Chill. Reserve the tail until ordered. Paint with herb-infused oil, season with kosher salt and fresh ground pepper, grill for two or three minutes until it’s just cooked through. Serve with spicy organic greens.”
― Graydon Carter, The Hunger: A Story of Food, Desire, and Ambition

“They wanted to make a low-budget indie [out of the script for Thelma & LouiseI. with [Amanda] Temple producing and [screenwriter Callie] Khouri directing. . . They even had the stars in mind: Holly Hunter and Frances MeDormand. Temple shopped the project and got consistently turned down. The protagonists, ‘basically detestable and unsympathetic, will never get the audience's support,’ one major producer decreed.”
Sheila Weller, “The Ride of a Lifetime,” March 2011”
― Graydon Carter, Vanity Fair 100 Years: From the Jazz Age to Our Age

“The Sopranos. . . The Real Housewives of New Jersey. . . Jersey Shore. . . Boardwalk Empire. . . That's the New Jersey we`ve come to know and love, where any bump in the road might just he somebody's head.”
James Wolcott, “Barbarians at the Shore,” October 2010”
― Graydon Carter, Vanity Fair 100 Years: From the Jazz Age to Our Age

“I found Hollywood to be none of the repellent things of which it is accused. Or, rather, I found that its vices and vulgarities exist in only a slightly greater proportion than they exist, say, on Park Avenue or Broadway. . . . ‘But they talk about nothing, nothing, nothing but pictures,’ exclaimed a prominent visitor from the East, who was talking about nothing, nothing, nothing but golf and stocks to a lovely young authoress who talked about nothing, nothing, nothing but books."
Clare Boothe Brokaw, “Hollywood is Not So Bad,” December 1931.”
― Graydon Carter, Vanity Fair 100 Years: From the Jazz Age to Our Age

“Let's play chess,’ [bachelor financier Jeffrey Epstein] said to me, after refusing to give an interview for this article. ‘You be white. You get the first move.’ It was an appropriate metaphor for a man who seems to feel he can win no matter what the advantage of the other side. His advantage is that no one really seems to know him or his history completely.”
Vicky Ward, “The Talented Mr. Epstein,” March 2003”
― Graydon Carter, Vanity Fair 100 Years: From the Jazz Age to Our Age

“The next day, April 30 [1975], Saigon fell, faster than we could have believed possible. It was the strangest and, I have to say, the most exciting day of my life. At the American Embassy the looting had just begun, and the streets outside were littered with typewriters.

On the first floor, a framed quotation from I awrence of Arabia read: Better to let them do it imperfectly than to do it perfectly yourself, for it is their country, their war, and your time is short I could not have guessed that, in the space of a mere morning, the last Americans would leave (at 7:53), and that the South [Vietnamese] would surrender.”
James Fenton, on the tenth anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War, “The Last Days of Saigon.” April 1985”
― Graydon Carter, Vanity Fair 100 Years: From the Jazz Age to Our Age

“The numbers are staggering. . . A recent Defense Department inspector general's draft survey revealed that. . . 7.4 percent of last year's female student body at the [U.S. Air Force Academy] were victims of rape or attempted rape, and 18.8 percent were victims of sexual assault. (By way of comparison, a 2000 Department of Justice study reported that nationwide 1.7 percent of female college students claimed to have been raped.) To this day, no cadet has been incarcerated for raping another cadet.”
Clara Bingham, “Code of Dishonor,” December 2003”
― Graydon Carter, Vanity Fair 100 Years: From the Jazz Age to Our Age

“Too much is talked nowadays about the dignity of labor.... Twenty-five years ago.... there were still men of leisure; now there are only women of leisure. What a melancholy decadence!.... It is not merely the new poor who work; it is the new rich, too, and, still more surprising, the old rich.... Working is now regarded as the obvious and respectable thing."
Aldous Huxley, “The Dangers of Work,” March 1924”
― Graydon Carter, Vanity Fair 100 Years: From the Jazz Age to Our Age

“Despite a decline in lvnching it has developed into a spectacle, a grand sport which draws huge "gates Promoters—and that term is no exaggeration—are aided by improved means of transportation, the telephone, the radio and the press, the latter being essential for ballyhoo
and for furnishing a pictoral and reportorial account.”
Austin Gilmour, “Lynching in America” June 1935”
― Graydon Carter, Vanity Fair 100 Years: From the Jazz Age to Our Age

“Since 1992, as the technological miracles and wonders have propagated and the political economy has transformed, the world has become radically and profoundly new. Here is what's odd: during these same 20 years, the appearance of the world (computers, TVs, telephones, and music players aside) has changed hardly at all, less than it did during any 20-year period for at least a century. The past is a foreign country, but the recent past—the 00s, the 90s, even a lot of the 80s—looks almost identical to the present. This is the First Great Paradox of Contemporary Cultural History.”
Kurt Andersen, “You Say You Want a Devolution?,” January 2012”
― Graydon Carter, Vanity Fair 100 Years: From the Jazz Age to Our Age

“There's the old question: What does it take to be an agent? Here's the answer: Nothing.”
ICM agent Ed Limato, to Kevin Sessums, “The Famous Eddie L.” January 1990”
― Graydon Carter, Vanity Fair 100 Years: From the Jazz Age to Our Age

“Now that the Soviet Union had folded as a foe, all we had to show was the state-of-the-art strengths of our [military] forces. So George [H. W.] Bush used them the first t chance he had. . . We had probably dumped some amount like 200 million pounds of explosive on Iraq and Kuwait, and that came down to 10 pounds virtually per person. . . George Bush went so far as to
suggest that the ghosts of Vietnam had been exorcised.”
Norman Mailer, “How the Wimp Wan the War,” Mav 1991”
― Graydon Carter, Vanity Fair 100 Years: From the Jazz Age to Our Age

“The mind of the American has no middle distance. He is either star-eyed and idealistic about a dim future, or else he is deadly practical and very efficient about some necessary job. It was this blindness to things in the middle distance that prevented America from seeing the war as it came on.. Much the same thing happened with regard to the League of Nations. So long as the League was a splendid dream, we loved it. [President Woodrow] Wilson, who for all his eccentricities is a stamped and patented American mind... swallowed it whole: the world must have a League that should govern Humanity." —John Jay Chapman, "Mr. Wilson's Inelastic Intelligence,” February 1920”
― Graydon Carter, Vanity Fair 100 Years: From the Jazz Age to Our Age

“The administration’s rationale for launching a pre-emptive war against another nation boiled down to three reasons, all of which are proving to be dubious:

• Iraq and terrorism. As it is turning out, Saddam Hussein was no real threat to America. And, according to two of the highest-ranking leaders of al-Qaeda currently in U.S. custody, he had no major links to the terrorist organization, or to the September 11 attacks.

• He had weapons of mass destruction. According to published reports, when the C.I.A. evaluations of the potential Iraqi nuclear threat weren’t, well, threatening enough, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had Pentagon intelligence units re-interpret the evidence to make it more frightening. (Where’s Jayson Blair when you need him?) And in The Sunday Times of London, Phillip Knightley reported that the pre-war findings of the British intelligence unit M.I.6 were rewritten by the Blair government to make them “more exciting” and, therefore, a more useful tool in the prime minister’s argument for war.

• Saddam be bad. Yes, of course he was bad. But if the presence of oppressive regimes is an adequate rationale for going to war, we’re going to be busy for a long time. When do we invade Liberia? Congo? Zimbabwe? Ivory Coast? New York City?”
—Graydon Carter, “The Phony War,” August 2003”
― Graydon Carter, Vanity Fair 100 Years: From the Jazz Age to Our Age

“Vanity Fair article: “The behavior of our money people is still treated as a subject for specialists. This is a huge cultural mistake. High finance touches—ruins—the lives of ordinary people in a way that, say, baseball does not, unless you are a Cubs fan. And yet, ordinary people, even those who have been most violated, are never left with a clear sense of how they’ve been touched or by whom. Wall Street, like a clever pervert, is often suspected but”
― Graydon Carter, When the Going Was Good: An Editor's Adventures During the Last Golden Age of Magazines

“The lure of the criminal career is economic Crime is solvent; second only to inheritanc as a short-cut to millions. Atrocious assault malicious mischief arson, mayhem and homicide are royal roads to wealth. It is difficult to see how a great economie trend of this kind can be reversed, requiring the gangster talkies to pipe down.”
Alva Johnston, “Easy Billions,” August 1931”
― Graydon Carter, Vanity Fair 100 Years: From the Jazz Age to Our Age

“It’s not so much what you say yes to in life as what you say no to.”
― Graydon Carter, When the Going Was Good: An Editor's Adventures During the Last Golden Age of Magazines

“scheme”
― Graydon Carter, Bohemians, Bootleggers, Flappers, and Swells: The Best of Early Vanity Fair

“we got fed up, and after consulting an actuary—giving him Trump’s physical details, age, eating habits, and whatnot—we began a monthly countdown to his own demise, under the headline “Death Be Not Short-Fingered.”
― Graydon Carter, When the Going Was Good: An Editor's Adventures During the Last Golden Age of Magazines

“[Al Capone's] highest achievement is that of
carrying Hollywood and Broadway on his shoulders. Most of the writers, dramatists, actors, scenarists and professors of sociology are living off he Big Boy to-day. If anything went wrong with the Capone department of belles-lettres, the publishing business would totter. The big racketeer has solved the problems of the motion picture industry [as well]. Capone came along to change the subject and give sex a well-earned holiday. The movie massacres were like a breath of pure air after all the impropriety and misconduct of the films.”
Alva Johnston, “Capone, King of Crime,” May 1931”
― Graydon Carter, Vanity Fair 100 Years: From the Jazz Age to Our Age

“People are missing the completeness of the corruption: It wasn't ‘Get me a hooker and I'll get you a defense contract from the appropriations committee.’ It's ‘I will take care of you and meet your every wish, need and fantasy, and in exchange you are going to take care of me!’”
Confidential source, to Judy Bachrach, on a Congressional bribery investigation, “Washington Babylon,” August 2006”
― Graydon Carter, Vanity Fair 100 Years: From the Jazz Age to Our Age

“When you are in a conflict, try to remove yourself from the ground surface and look down on the scene from above. It is only there that you can examine the problem, if there is one, and do so objectively.”
― Graydon Carter, When the Going Was Good: An Editor's Adventures During the Last Golden Age of Magazines

“Once upon a time, the drugs Americans took were tested primarily either in the United States (the vast majority of cases) or in Europe. No longer. . . A database being compiled by the National Institutes of Health has identified 58,788 such trials in 173 countries outside the United States since 2000. In 2008 alone. according to the inspector general's report, 80 percent of the applications submitted to the FD.A. for new drugs contained data from foreign clinical trials [where regulations are) less stringent if there are any regulations at all [, and] the risk of litigation is negligible. in some places nonexistent.”
Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele, “Deadlhy Medicine,” January 2011
I”
― Graydon Carter, Vanity Fair 100 Years: From the Jazz Age to Our Age

“[Facebook chief] Mark [Zuckerberg's] vision of the world is that you should be comfortable sharing your real self on the Internet. He thinks
that anonymity represents a lack of authenticity, almost a cowardice. . . . I disagree with that.”
Christopher Poole, to Vanessa Grigoriadis, “4Chan's Chaos Theory,”
April 2011”
― Graydon Carter, Vanity Fair 100 Years: From the Jazz Age to Our Age

“The Year of the Woman. A poor means of celebrating even the second sex, let alone the first one. . . . Was it Spike Lee who said that when they had a Black History Month you just knew it would be February.”
The Editors, on the 1992 “Hall of Fame,” dedicated to the theme “A Few Good Women,” December 1992”
― Graydon Carter, Vanity Fair 100 Years: From the Jazz Age to Our Age

“You might set fire to widows, deflower orphans, or filch the flags from soldiers' graves, and still be invited to all the literary teas.”
Dorothy Parker, “A Valentine for Mr. Woollcott,” February 1934”
― Graydon Carter, Vanity Fair 100 Years: From the Jazz Age to Our Age

“A decline in money-values so severe as that which we are now experiencing threatens the solidity of the whole financial structure. Banks and bankers are by nature blind. They have not seen what was coming. . . . The present signs suggest that the bankers of the world are bent on suicide. At every stage they have been unwilling to adopt a sufficiently drastic remedy. . . . It is necessarily part of the business of a banker to
maintain appearances and to profess a conventional respectability which is more than human. Lifelong practices of this kind make them the most romantic and the least realistic of men. It is so much their stock-in-trade that their position should not be questioned, that they do not even question it themselves until it is too late. Like the honest citizens they are, they feel a proper indig-nation at the perils of the wicked world in which they live—when the perils mature; but they do not foresee them. A Bankers’ Conspiracy! The idea is absurd! I onlv wish there were one!”
J. M. Keynes, “Banks and the Collapse of Money
Values,” January 1932”
― Graydon Carter, Vanity Fair 100 Years: From the Jazz Age to Our Age

“It is now past midnight in Mustique. . . Maxim's New York editors have just faxed (publisher Felix Dennis a draft of the March cover, the main headline of which reads, ‘Sexaholic!’. . . Dennis lights another cigarette. ‘If I get lung cancer,’ he says, 'I will die by an overdose of crack cocaine with an 18-year-old perched on top of me—I absolutely swear to you I will.”
Nina Munk, “Dennis the Menace.” May 2001”
― Graydon Carter, Vanity Fair 100 Years: From the Jazz Age to Our Age

“Everyone in Hollywood is a showman at heart. Here the instinct and talent for super-production and super-display have penetrated, not only the films themselves, but the private lives, the intimate moments, the smallest accidental gesture of the eager opportunists engaged in making them... Salesmanship, Advertising and Publicity, the tri-gods of the wealthiest (and noisiest) nation in the world, thrive in Hollywood and multiply their kind like a plague of locusts.”
Joseph Henry Steele, “Hollywood Epizooty,” September 1930”
― Graydon Carter, Vanity Fair 100 Years: From the Jazz Age to Our Age