Vanity Fair 100 Years Quotes

“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

“I had a nervous breakdown when I was 17 or 18, when I had to go and work with [model and actor] Marky Mark and [photographer] Herb Ritts. It didn't feel like me at all. I felt really bad about straddling this buff guy [to appear in a Calvin Klein ad]. I didn't like it. I couldn't get out of bed for two weeks. I thought I was going to die. I went to the doctor, and he said, "I'll give you some Valium," and Francesca Sorrenti, thank God, said, "You're not taking that." It was just anxiety. Nobody takes care of you mentally. There's a massive pressure to do what you have to do.”
Kate Moss, to James Fox, "The Riddle of Kate Moss," December 2012”
― Graydon Carter, Vanity Fair 100 Years: From the Jazz Age to Our Age

“When [the ocean-liner Costa Concordia] began to roll, 'I couldn't understand what was going on, the movement was so violent,' says [Mario] Pellegrini, [deputy mayor of Giglio]. 'That's when the panic hit, and the electricity went out as well. Lights winking out all over. And when the ship stopped moving, we were in the dark, just the moon, the light of the full moon. And everyone was screaming.'”
Bryan Burrough, "Another Night to Remember," May 2012”
― Graydon Carter, Vanity Fair 100 Years: From the Jazz Age to Our Age

“For whatever reason, Tony Soprano was very available and recognizable to a great number of people who had never gone near a mobster, who'd never eaten a meatball sandwich. They related to that guy; they saw who he was.”
The Sopranos creator David Chase to Sam Kashner and Jim Kelly, “The Family Hour: An Oral History of [the HBO series] The Sopranos,” April 2012”
― Graydon Carter, Vanity Fair 100 Years: From the Jazz Age to Our Age

“It was just what you did automatically, go to lunch with friends. And it was so different than now. People were at the top of their form. Those restaurants were so beautiful and people felt they had to live up to the elegance of the setting. You wore your latest Givenchy or Balenciaga. And you felt that there were delicious conversations taking place at every table. Now you go into a place and everything looks transactional.”
Socialite Deeda Blair to Bob Colacello, “Here's to the Ladies Who Lunched!,” February 2012”
― 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

“The further we get from the 18 days it took to end Muhammad Hosni Sayyid Mubarak's 30-year rule in Egypt, the more remarkable and heroic they seem... Whatever happens, Egyptians now know that democracy and freedom are never given: they must be taken."
Henry Porter, "Waking of the Lion," May 2011”
― Graydon Carter, Vanity Fair 100 Years: From the Jazz Age to Our Age

“The more divided a society becomes in terms of wealth, the more reluctant the wealthy become to spend money on common needs. The rich don't need to rely on government for parks or education or medical care or personal security—they can buy all these things for themselves. In the process, they become more distant from ordinary people, losing whatever empathy they may once have had. . .

The top 1 percent have the best houses, the best educations, the best doctors, and the best lifestyles, but there is one thing that money doesn't seem to have bought: an understanding that their fate is bound up with how the other 99 percent live. Throughout history, this is something that the top percent eventually do learn. Too late.”
Joseph E. Stiglitz, “Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%,” which helped popularize the term “We are the 99%,” used by the Occupy Wall Street protesters, May 2011”
― 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

“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

“Hollywood's post-crash aversion to $20-millon paydays and gross-point deals seems to be easing. . . As one studio executive put it, ‘We’re not trying to commit felonies here, just a few misdemeanors.”
Peter Newcomb, in compiling V.F.'s list ranking the biggest earners in entertainment, “Hollywood's Top 40.” March 2011”
― Graydon Carter, Vanity Fair 100 Years: From the Jazz Age to Our Age

“Left alone in a dark room with a pile of money, the Irish decided what they really wanted to do with it was to buy Ireland. From one another.”
Michael Lewis, “When Irish Eves Are Crving” March 2011”
― Graydon Carter, Vanity Fair 100 Years: From the Jazz Age to Our Age

“At the Capitol [on inauguration day], an icy wind swept across the East Front in the brilliant sunshine. As [President John F.] Kennedy made his way down the aisle to his seat, he saw Congressman Tip O'Neill, who held J.F.K.'s old House seat, together with George Kara, an affluent Boston businessman with a reputation for showing up, Zelig-like, in the most unexpected places without the requisite tickets. O'Neill recalled that Kara had nudged him and said,
'Years from now historians will wonder what was on the young man's mind as he strode to take his oath of office. I bet he's asking himself how George Kara got such a good seat.'

That night, O'Neill and his wife danced over to the president's box at the ball in the Mayflower Hotel to congratulate him, and sure enough, Kennedy asked, 'Was that George Kara sitting beside you?' O'Neill told Kennedy what Kara had said.

And J.F.K. replied, ‘Tip: you'll never believe it. I had my left hand on the Bible and my right hand in the air, and I was about to take the oath of office, and I said to myself, "How the hell did Kara get that seat?’”
Todd S. Purdum, “From That Day Forth,” February 2011”
― Graydon Carter, Vanity Fair 100 Years: From the Jazz Age to Our Age

“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

“[My cinematic characters are] all still there [in my psyche], which on some level can't be the healthiest thing in the world. . . I always picture it as this chest of drawers in your body—Ed Wood is in one, the Hater is in another, Scissorhands is in another. They stick with you. Hunter [S. Thompson]s certainly in there—you know, Raoul Duke. The weirdest thing is that I can access them. They're still very elose to the surface.”
Johnny Depp, to Patti Smith, “The Crowded Mind of Johnny Depp,” January 2011”
― Graydon Carter, Vanity Fair 100 Years: From the Jazz Age to Our Age

“If this story were presented as a screenplay, no producer would buy it. It's just too incredible. A flamboyant artist [,Françoise-Marie Banier.] charms
his way into the good graces of an 88-year-old
heiress [Liliane Bettencourt], who gives him gifts
worth more than $1 billion. The heiress's daughter sues the dandy. . . Meanwhile, the old lady's butler secretly records her conversations with her financial
advisers. Leaked to the press, the recordings suggest
massive tax fraud, murky ownership of a tropical island, and cozy, perhaps illegal relations with
[Nicolas Sarkozy], the country's president, whose
campaign was partially funded by the heiress. . . Added to all that, the colossal fortune in question comes from a cosmetics firm founded by an anti-Semitic Nazi sympathizer, whose granddaughter, the plaintiff, is married to the grandson of a rabbi who died at Auschwitz. Would anyone buy that?”
Tom Sancton, “The Bettencourt Affair,” November 2010”
― 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

“It's no surprise that the most monstrously profitable company of our time has a name that could have been made up by a five-month-old: Google, Twitter, another hot digital entity with a babyish name, has reduced even Shaquille O' Neal to peppering his postings with cute emoticons.

:( . . .

That's me crying over the depressing rise of cuteness.”
Jim Windolf, “Addicted to Cute,"” December 2009”
― Graydon Carter, Vanity Fair 100 Years: From the Jazz Age to Our Age

“The bad press was relentless. In Ruth Madoff's eyes, Vanity Fair was the lowest of the low, She considered the stories written by me. . . the worst of them all.”
Mark Seal, “Ruth's World,” September 2009”
― Graydon Carter, Vanity Fair 100 Years: From the Jazz Age to Our Age

“Of the $ 12 billion in U.S. banknotes delivered to Iraq in 2003 and 2004, at least $9 billion cannot be accounted for.”
Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele, “Billions over Baghdad,” October 2007”
― Graydon Carter, Vanity Fair 100 Years: From the Jazz Age to Our Age

“Stephen Schwarzman, who runs the Blackstone Group and is perhaps the most successful, or show-offy. of the private-equity moguls (he makes $300 million a year or so), celebrated his 60th birthday this winter with a multimillion-dollar party of the era at Manhattan's Park Avenue Armory for 1,500 friends and any celebrity who'd show up. . . More cautious people equated Schwarzman's birthday with the party Saul Steinberg, a financial self-promoter of the 80s,
threw for himself in 1989, which marked the high point of that bubble. Even Schwarzman himself
was hinting that the end might be near.”
Michael Wolff, “Serious Money,” May 2007”
― 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

“Look,' [hedge-fund founder] Joseph Jacobs is assuring me, ‘no one starts out wanting a 30,000-square-foot home. You say, “I want this and that” and then you get up to 30,000 square feet.’ To be precise, the newhouse Jacobs hopes to build in Greenwich is 32,114 square feet, plus a 1,165-square-foot pool house.”
Nina Munk, “Greenwich's Outrageous Fortunes,”
Jul 2006”
― Graydon Carter, Vanity Fair 100 Years: From the Jazz Age to Our Age

“In every direction, as far as the eye can see, there is endless, teeming construction. The shore does not contain it. Arabesques of manufactured islands rise from the blue sea waves. Tens of thousands of men labor. . . as if following blueprints derived from an overlay of medieval translucentvellum schemas of Dante's Inferno. . . . Here we are, in a surreal future beyond your aesthete's imagining. It's called Dubai.”
Nick Tosches, “Dubai's the Limit,” June 2006”
― Graydon Carter, Vanity Fair 100 Years: From the Jazz Age to Our Age

“The bite-size and broken-grid elements of nearly every printed page owe themselves to the Macintosh. The plasticity of pictures, of video, and the ease and
economy with which the visual world can be manipulated. . . . is a Mac by-product. The transformation (or death, depending on your point of view) of the music business is Steve [Jobs] and the iPod, [which] will soon devour moving images. . . And this not to even mention the personal computer itself . . . Everywhere, Jobs has been helping media consumers take media away from the media business itself. . .
It's the technology, stupid. It's the experience, stupid. It's the box that gets us off and makes us what we are. We're not watching media, we're inhabiting it. [Steve Jobs is] not just McLuhan in the media business, he's Edison—the autodidact garage inventor. And, too, he's Henry Ford. . . . Happy 30th anniversary, Apple.” Michael Wolff, “iPod, Therefore I Am,” April 2006
IT”
― Graydon Carter, Vanity Fair 100 Years: From the Jazz Age to Our Age

“Like L.A., MySpace is a place where the fallen and the exhausted go to re-invent themselves.”
James Verini, “Will Success Spoil MySpace?,” March 2006”
― Graydon Carter, Vanity Fair 100 Years: From the Jazz Age to Our Age

“I remember thinking one day, It'd be so great if you could carry a vase of roses around with you all the time.”
Fashion entrepreneur Lulu Guinness, to Laura Jacobs, “Life According to Lulu,” January 2006”
― Graydon Carter, Vanity Fair 100 Years: From the Jazz Age to Our Age

“[Martha] Stewart has just come downstairs dressed in an orange polo shirt and orange Capri pants. On her feet are gold clogs . . . and on her right ankle, very much in view, is the black electronie monitoring device she is forced to wear [as a term of home confinement after she was found] guilty of lying to investigators probing the ImClone insider-trading scandal. . . . ‘I hate lock down. It's hideous,’ she announces.”
Matt Tyrnauer, “The Prisoner of Bedford,” August 2005”
― Graydon Carter, Vanity Fair 100 Years: From the Jazz Age to Our Age

“[Richard Duke of] Helliburton. Babylon's oil must
be ours./The Persian Gulf is ours to get and keep . . . .
Rummy Baron Bechtoll. Let Wolfie speak for the Cabal. . . .
Dubya. Let the Cabal chant!
Cabal. All hail Dubya! All hail Macbush,
Thane of Crawford. Thief of Baghdad. King-Emperor of Oceania!”
Harold Bloom, “Macbush: Fragments of the Tragicomical History of Dubya the Great,” April 2004”
― Graydon Carter, Vanity Fair 100 Years: From the Jazz Age to Our Age

“Blogs have speedily matured into the most vivifying. talent-swapping, socializing breakthrough in popular journalism since the burst of coffe house periodicals and political pamphleteering in the 18th century, when The Spectator, The Tatler, and sundry other sheets liberated writing from literary patronage. . . . If Tom Paine were alive and paroled, he'’d be blog-jamming against the Patriot Act, whose very name he’d find obscene.”
James Wolcot, “The Laptop Brigade,” April 2004”
― Graydon Carter, Vanity Fair 100 Years: From the Jazz Age to Our Age