98% of the people who get the magazine say they read the cartoons first - and the other 2% are lying.
David RemnickRead
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.
Interpretation
Life is a complex mix of experiences, and creators have the duty to pause and reflect on these moments.
David Remnick's quote highlights the chaotic and multifaceted nature of the world, filled with crises, beauty, and strangeness. He emphasizes the role of writers and artists to take a step back and observe when the constant movement of life slows down, as this pause allows for deeper insights and understanding of the human experience.
In practice
In a discussion about the importance of pause in creative processes.
98% of the people who get the magazine say they read the cartoons first - and the other 2% are lying.
Everybody has a cartoon of themselves. Mine is: I write very fast, and I'm ruthlessly efficient with my time.
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.
If you believe, as the Greeks did, that man is at the mercy of the gods, then you write tragedy. The end is inevitable from the beginning. But if you believe that man can solve his own problems and is at nobody's mercy, then you will probably write melodrama.
Making money ain't nothing exciting to me. You might be able to buy a little better booze than the wino on the corner. But you get sick just like the next cat and when you die you're just as graveyard dead as he is.
The worse a person is the less he feels it.
Like most misery, it started with apparent happiness.
It may be in the cultural particularities of people — in their oddities — that some of the most instructive revelations of what it is to be generically human are to be found.
The Gross National Product measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country. It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile, and it can tell us everything about America - except whether we are proud to be Americans.
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