Top 97 Graydon Quotes
#1. He had not become a sentinel by worrying about what he should or shouldn't do. He would live or die as he always had, by making decision he knew to be right ...
Graydon didn't hide from life. He flew at it with everything he had.
Thea Harrison
#2. Among the young ravens driven to roost awhile on Graydon's ark was James Andrew Manallace - a darkish, slow northerner of a type that does not ignite, but must be detonated. ("Dayspring Mishandled")
Rudyard Kipling
#3. London was littered with social clubs and houses of chance, but Malfeasance was not just any gaming hell. It was located in the most notorious part of London and, Graydon had heard, was run by a pariah Djinn named Malphas.
Thea Harrison
#4. A short time later, near Gallina Springs, Graydon's scouting party came upon the Mescaleros again. What happened there is not clear, because no Mescalero survived the incident.
Dee Brown
#5. A dragon just gave me a piece of jewelry," she said. She took another swig and handed the bottle back to Graydon. "Have I been added to his hoard?"
He shook his head and drank too. "No, cupcake," he said. "I'm pretty sure you've replaced it.
Thea Harrison
#6. Graydon: "Where are those files you wanted me to look at? I can never figure out the new system on the shared drive, and you promised you'd show me. Call me back when you can."
No, son. You can figure it out on your own. I have faith in you.
Thea Harrison
#7. I might wear a dinner jacket once a year to our Oscar party - that's a big thing - but I don't go to parties. I'm social but I'm not a socialite person.
Graydon Carter
#8. In the Digital Age, recorders also tend to be oversharers, and with Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest, they can do so on a grand scale.
Graydon Carter
#10. The danger of leaving overwhelming wealth and power in the grasp of a small minority is a lesson that leaders such as ousted Tunisian president Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali and deposed Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak have learned a little too late, as the demonstrations across the Arab world indicate.
Graydon Carter
#11. Only institutions that go about the old-fashioned business of taking in deposits from customer A and lending them out to customer B should be called banks. The rest should call themselves what they are. 'Parlors' would be appropriate, or 'dens' - words more suitable to venerable betting pursuits.
Graydon Carter
#12. Let's face it, who among us wouldn't take a pill or potion that would make us better at our job? Goodness knows, we abuse substances for just about everything in our personal lives; why not in our professional lives as well?
Graydon Carter
#13. Every man in the back of their minds would like to own a bar or a racehorse.
Graydon Carter
#14. Magazines at some point become hostage to their own success.
Graydon Carter
#15. Those who remember New York in the 1970s, as I do, look back on a city that had hit a very rough patch - decaying, bankrupt, and crime-ridden. But fun.
Graydon Carter
#16. Most of us have learned the hard way that there are very few things you can absolutely count on in life.
Graydon Carter
#17. Arrogance, ignorance, and incompetence. Not a pretty cocktail of personality traits in the best of situations. No sirree. Not a pretty cocktail in an office-mate and not a pretty cocktail in a head of state. In fact, in a leader, it's a lethal cocktail.
Graydon Carter
#18. It could safely be said that Iraqis are dying at a faster clip since the American-led invasion and occupation than they did during the last decade of Saddam Hussein's rule.
Graydon Carter
#19. Christopher Hitchens was a wit, a charmer, and a troublemaker, and to those who knew him well, he was a gift from - dare I say it - God.
Graydon Carter
#20. I really don't despise anyone. But there is a list of a half dozen people I would prefer never to hear from or see again.
Graydon Carter
#21. War is a form of really bad manners, in a strange way. Invading a country I think is just the worst possible manners. 'You're not invited!' Gate crashing on a large scale!
Graydon Carter
#22. History is nothing if not an epic tale of missed opportunities.
Graydon Carter
#23. I don't think you can be a credible, modern candidate for president without making the environment a major part of your platform.
Graydon Carter
#24. The fact is that movie stars are as insecure as the rest of us - if not more so. Many live in a luxurious bubble in which their best friends are their trainer, their hairdresser, their publicist, and their Kabbalah instructor.
Graydon Carter
#25. 'Green' does not have to mean the sort of hair-shirt, wood-burning-stove sensibility of the '70s. Green can and should be sleek and modern.
Graydon Carter
#26. There aren't any looks or customs I wish would come back. Today almost anything goes. Culture constantly devours the past so there's not much that's missing.
Graydon Carter
#27. You have to give kids something to rebel against. You can't like their music - you have to call it noise. It's incumbent on a parent.
Graydon Carter
#28. Television has the obvious benefits of regularity and intimacy.
Graydon Carter
#29. It's estimated that across Africa 100 elephants are killed for their tusks every day. It takes nothing more than simple math to get to what that adds up to in a year, and it's a distressing figure.
Graydon Carter
#30. Americans who grew up in the 1930s or 1940s still have some fleeting memory of what the country was like before it became the steroidal superpower it is today.
Graydon Carter
#31. I don't do any research. It's all about gut. Editing - it's always about gut.
Graydon Carter
#32. You know, I used to warm the thermometer on the light bulb ... I was really good at being sick. I could forge my mother's signature on a sick note so well I was hardly ever at school.
Graydon Carter
#33. I think Americans, more so than any other culture, love second and third acts.
Graydon Carter
#34. Hatred for Obama ... has more to do with race than anything else.
Graydon Carter
#35. Satire works best when it hews close to the line between the outlandish and the possible - and as that line continues to grow thinner, the satirist's task becomes ever more difficult.
Graydon Carter
#36. Memory is often - perhaps usually - a distorting lens: what we think we remember isn't the way it was at all. It's what we'd like to remember.
Graydon Carter
#37. It's a rare moment when we take a break from the tribulations of the daily rat race to reflect on assumptions and values that we casually accept as gospel.
Graydon Carter
#38. Issues such as transparency often boil down to which side of - pick a number - 40 you're on. Under 40, and transparency is generally considered a good thing for society. Over 40, and one generally chooses privacy over transparency. On every side of this issue, hypocrisy abounds.
Graydon Carter
#39. 'The Guardian,' with its deep journalistic traditions, is careful about context and explanation. It sees itself as a gatekeeper, and it worries about consequences.
Graydon Carter
#41. In 2004, I wrote 'What We've Lost,' a book about the Bush administration. It sold only reasonably well, in part, I think, because the book was a horrific downer, an unrelenting account of the administration's actions, bungles, deceptions, half-truths, untruths, and downright corruptions.
Graydon Carter
#42. As any editor will tell you, startling newsroom revelations are generally met with queries about where the information came from and how the reporter got it. Seriously startling revelations are followed by the vetting of libel lawyers.
Graydon Carter
#43. My hunch is that pop culture began to stagnate the moment Americans started to love the past more than they did the future.
Graydon Carter
#44. I actually don't know how magazines are produced, I'll be honest with you. I have no idea.
Graydon Carter
#45. 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
#46. What do you call an electorate that seems prone to acting out irrationally, is full of inchoate rage, and is constantly throwing fits and tantrums? You call it teenaged.
Graydon Carter
#47. Financial institutions like to call what they do trading. Let's be honest. It's not trading; it's betting.
Graydon Carter
#48. In Britain, libel damages are small and people build them into the cost of doing business. In America, libel is very rare and much harder to prove, but the damages are enormous.
Graydon Carter
#50. Where past generations had film cameras, scrapbooks, notebooks, and that part of the brain which stores memories, we now have a smartphone app for every conceivable recording need.
Graydon Carter
#51. The shelf life of a movie actor or actress is so short, it's like milk.
Graydon Carter
#52. As someone who came to New York in the 1970s, I was, like so many of my friends, a certified member of what we now call the 99 percent - and I was a lot closer to the bottom than to the top of that 99 percent. At some point during the intervening years, I moved into the 1 percent.
Graydon Carter
#53. Magazine stories, the best ones anyway, are generally a combination of three elements: access, narrative, and disclosure.
Graydon Carter
#54. People think they have to be ambitious. But at a certain age, all you want is to be around nice, decent people.
Graydon Carter
#55. Every minute you invest in kids you get back four times over.
Graydon Carter
#56. I try to look after the really small things and the really big things, and delegate the stuff in between,
Graydon Carter
#57. Stationery is addictive. I get mine made in Paris at Benetton, and writing on it gives me a strange thrill.
Graydon Carter
#58. It could fairly be said that the U.S. is increasingly out of step with the rest of the world. As our neighbors to the south elect left-wing or even socialist governments, we are lurching further to the right. As Europe becomes less engaged to the Church, we are becoming more fundamentalist.
Graydon Carter
#59. Many men think they're playboys, but they invariably land wide of the mark. Surrounding yourself with champagne, fast friends, and paid escorts is the very definition of the word 'loser.'
Graydon Carter
#60. I walk down the street and people don't go, 'My God, there he is.' I lead as normal a life as you can lead in New York City.
Graydon Carter
#61. We need an army of white-haired, wild-eyed radicals cutting a swath against the sexism that crosses our paths. It is a good antidote to the larger community's apparent belief that older women are slightly dotty, grandmotherly, benign souls.
Shari Graydon
#62. As you get older and fatter, good clothes can hide a lot.
Graydon Carter
#64. Television offers a range and scope, and a degree of creativity and daring, that the bottom-line, global-audience-obsessed, brand-driven movie industry just can't compete with.
Graydon Carter
#65. Take a random selection of photographs of America in 2012 and 2002 and 1992 and, except for the skinny jeans and the porkpie hats, you'll be hard-pressed to tell the years in which the pictures were taken.
Graydon Carter
#66. I think the movie business is in trouble. It's all movies that you've seen before. Everything's a remake; they want things that are familiar rather than things that surprise you.
Graydon Carter
#67. The fact is, unlike a lot of writers, I credit the people who help me. A lot of writers out there have a ton of researchers and they don't get credited in the book.
Graydon Carter
#68. It's no surprise that the Bush administration's bullying swagger and blithe ignorance have caused much of the Muslim world to hold the U.S. in rock-bottom regard.
Graydon Carter
#69. Water-boarding can result in damage to the lungs and the brain, as well as long-term psychological trauma.
Graydon Carter
#70. My suggestion to newspapers everywhere is to give the public a reason to read them again. So here's an idea: get on a big story with widespread public appeal, devote your best resources to it, say a quiet prayer, and swing for the fences.
Graydon Carter
#71. The last thing businessmen want to do is sit in a room filled with other businessmen. A room full of money is a pretty boring sight - unless it's yours, of course.
Graydon Carter
#72. We admire elephants in part because they demonstrate what we consider the finest human traits: empathy, self-awareness, and social intelligence. But the way we treat them puts on display the very worst of human behavior.
Graydon Carter
#73. Conservatives define themselves more by their hatred of liberals than anything else, and, conversely, liberals by their distaste for conservatives.
Graydon Carter
#74. Cod is more responsible for the discovery of the New World than almost anything else. Drove the Vikings across the North Atlantic, and John Cabot discovered America by looking for cod.
Graydon Carter
#75. There is a certain ancient civility about tailors that is welcome - especially in modern London, which is now very much an international city, not an English city. They're still a little vessel of Englishness in what is otherwise a pretty rambunctious place.
Graydon Carter
#77. Fashion is a dangerous road to go down. Anybody who is going to have children later in life had best not be too fashionable because the photos will come back to haunt them.
Graydon Carter
#78. It could fairly be said that America, during the Bush years, has entered an Age of Denial - arguably the first stage of a nation's decline.
Graydon Carter
#79. In this age of 24-7 headlines, the term 'newsweekly' seems almost quaint.
Graydon Carter
#80. There's probably a half-dozen movie actors I really like. But a lot of them just aren't that interesting.
Graydon Carter
#81. In America, the top 1 percent led the country into war and economic devastation, leaving the less fortunate to fight for one and pay for both.
Graydon Carter
#82. To a young kid growing up in Canada, America seemed to be crazy about the future; dazzled by it.
Graydon Carter
#83. The greatest thing that prepared me for editing 'Vanity Fair' was having four kids because you just learn to subjugate your ego with the greater interest in mind.
Graydon Carter
#84. As any journalist will tell you, there are few professional situations as vexing as when a friend becomes involved in a major story that you feel you must cover.
Graydon Carter
#85. Somewhere along the way, New York became all about money. Or rather, it was always about money, but it wasn't all about money, if you know what I mean. New York's not Geneva or Zurich yet, but we're certainly heading in that direction. London is, too.
Graydon Carter
#86. As a father of five, I sometimes feel I've spent a lifetime watching Disney musicals.
Graydon Carter
#87. You lose manufacturing jobs, you rarely ever get them back again.
Graydon Carter
#88. A workday lunch that lasts as long as a transcontinental flight is an impossibility for all but the most pliant and footloose of food tourists. To get in the game, you need a thick wallet, an adventurous palate, and a whole lot of time.
Graydon Carter
#89. I have always thought you could take the measure of a man by his sports manners - that is to say, the way in which he conducts himself on the playing field, or even over a game of chess or cards.
Graydon Carter
#90. Branding experts believe that just because they have rethought a company's image or name, the rest of us will automatically fall in line.
Graydon Carter
#91. I always thought eating what you wanted was one of those aspects of adulthood to be looked forward to when you were a child.
Graydon Carter
#92. After the collapse of Wall Street in the 1920s, the culture stopped being all about money, and the country survived and ultimately flourished.
Graydon Carter
#93. I think the absence of socks on men wearing suits and brogues is a problem. They'll live to regret that.
Graydon Carter
#94. Many of the architects of the Vietnam War became near pariahs as they spent the remainder of their lives in the futile quest to explain away their decisions at the time.
Graydon Carter
#95. I did a bunch of blue-collar jobs, because I knew I'd wind up with a white-collar job at some point, and I wanted to, I don't know, I just wanted to taste life. I dug graves for a while, I worked as a stock boy in a big department store, I worked in a bank.
Graydon Carter
#96. In an age when all that was old seems new again, Bernard DeVoto's The Hour couldn't have made a more timely reappearance. This book reminds me of one of the joys of being an adult-cocktail hour!
Graydon Carter
#97. I'm losing my hair. I'm overweight. It's not like that's at the top of the list when women go looking for a man. It's like - complete collapse, every year.
Graydon Carter
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