98% of the people who get the magazine say they read the cartoons first - and the other 2% are lying.

98% of the people who get the magazine say they read the cartoons first - and the other 2% are lying.

A.J. Liebling, one of my heroes, used to say that he could write better than anyone who wrote faster, and faster than anyone who could write better. I'm one nine-hundredth as good as Liebling, but that principle may slightly apply.

Capitalism in Russia has spawned far more Al Capones than Henry Fords.

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

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

I actually have great hopes for the future.

I have to always remember, writing is really hard.

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

I think dealing with the U.S. Senate is very different from dealing with the electorate.

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

I'm a civilian, a citizen.

I'm a journalist - I'm not Robert Caro. I have a day job, and a pretty consuming one - a joyfully consuming one.

I'm interested in Russian language, culture, history... and I lived there, for four years, as a reporter for the Washington Post and have visited many times since.

I'm not the slowest writer that you know.

If the story is good enough, if it's imaginative enough, if it's moving enough it is going to reach deeper than the level of sheer information and change somebody's life two degrees. That is an enormous achievement.

Most magazines have peak moments. They live on, they do just okay, or they die. 'The New Yorker' has had a very different kind of existence.

My time as editor has been overlapped by a crisis - a prolonged, labyrinthine, tragic, seemingly non-ending crisis - that involves the prehistory of 9/11, 9/11, Iraq, Afghanistan, fraught histories between the United States and almost everyone.

Nature is cold, wet, hard and unforgiving.

Not all political prisoners are innocents.

Reform is not a period of retreat.

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.

The Cold War was wildly expensive and consumed the entire globe.

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.

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.

Very rarely is there a spike in news-stand sales.

You know what writers say about their long books: If I had another year, the book would be half as long.

Democratic institutions even in the oldest operating democracy in the world are anything but perfect.

Every good journalist is aware that his trade may one day go the way of phrenology and, what's more, the population will hardly protest the extinction.

Journalism, some huge percentage of it, should be devoted to putting pressure on power, on nonsense, on chicanery of all kinds and if that's going to invite a lawsuit, well, bring it on.

Maybe Santa Claus is real. Here's the problem: reality.

I'm not up on today's television for children, because it's mostly cartoons that don't seem to interest me.

The Gorillaz cartoons seem more real to me than the actual people on TV. Because at least you know that there's some intelligence behind the cartoons, and there's a lot of work that's gone into it, so it can't all be just a lie.

I was unable to sleep and I would stay up and draw these little cartoons. Then a friend showed them around. Before I knew it I was a cartoonist.

My intended audience was everybody. I just want to make cartoons for human beings.

I have no idea what readership is of written editorials, but it doesn't come anywhere close to the readership of editorial cartoons.

Why does this person who is sitting behind a desk and never watches cartoons is arguing about what cartoons should be like. Its so creepy realizing that this person is a lunatic.

I started doing cartoons when I was about 21. I never thought I would be a cartoonist. It happened behind my back. I was always a painter and drawer.

At one time Tribune Syndicate emptied out their storeroom. They put tables full of original cartoons down in the lobby and said take one if you want one. The comics were simply a burden to them.

There is too much illustrating of the news these days. I look at many editorial cartoons and I don't know what the cartoonists are saying or how they feel about a certain issue.

Well, for one thing, the executives in charge at Cartoon Network are cartoon fans. I mean, these are people who grew up loving animation and loving cartoons, and the only difference between them and me is they don't know how to draw.

I would like to thank the people who encouraged me to draw army cartoons at a time when the gag man's conception of the army was one of mean ole sergeants and jeeps which jump over mountains.

I first pitched the idea of doing a series of cartoons based on Bible stories. They didn't much like it.

I've never canceled a subscription to a newspaper because of bad cartoons or editorials. If that were the case, I wouldn't have any newspapers or magazines to read.

I don t think cartoons are only for kids, but I think kids will love anything as long as it's visually interesting.

I see myself as an artist who happens to do cartoons.

I realized that people make cartoons for a living. It had never dawned on me that you could do this as a career.

And, uh, I've got about six thousand cartoons up there, also books and papers.

Making cartoons means very hard work at every step of the way, but creating a successful cartoon character is the hardest work of all.