The Vanity Fair Diaries Quotes

“Deadlines are a great antidote to insecurity.”
― Tina Brown, The Vanity Fair Diaries: 1983-1992

“Writing doesn't improve by not doing it.”
― Tina Brown, The Vanity Fair Diaries: 1983-1992

“A reporter asked me which famous woman was my role model, a question that always leaves me stumped. I know it’s the wrong feminist answer, but most of my role models have been men. They always had the lives I wanted.”
― Tina Brown, The Vanity Fair Diaries: 1983-1992

“To maintain momentum, you must rejoice in risk.”
― Tina Brown, The Vanity Fair Diaries: 1983-1992

“A magazine—a relevant one—should be a sound, not an echo.”
― Tina Brown, The Vanity Fair Diaries: 1983-1992

“I sometimes feel there’s a bravery, even nobility, to people who leave their own country for some other dream. It makes you so vulnerable. There is a bit of my own expatriate heart that’s frozen, not here, not there, a lonely thing.”
― Tina Brown, The Vanity Fair Diaries: Power, Wealth, Celebrity, and Dreams: My Years at the Magazine That Defined a Decade

“I went for a drink at the Algonquin with Wallace Shawn, the editor of The New Yorker’s son, who I have been told wants to write. I loved his creaky voice and twinkly, creased-up eyes. He’s like a small, anxious hippo, so full of quotable insights. “America has no memory,” he explained. “Nothing LEADS to anything in New York.”
― Tina Brown, The Vanity Fair Diaries: Power, Wealth, Celebrity, and Dreams: My Years at the Magazine That Defined a Decade

“tear. Short and nebbishy, he had a charmingly awkward persona that concealed a big ambition: to establish Condé Nast as the most prestigious magazine company in the world. Within a year of his father’s death in 1979, Si, in rapid succession, bought the most important publishing house in America, Random House, whose imprints included Alfred A. Knopf, the prestige literary house; oversaw the successful start-up of a pioneering health and fitness magazine, Self; and bought and revamped Gentleman’s Quarterly, better known as GQ. And he was always on the lookout for more. Si was the aesthete in the Newhouse family. He combined an eye for business opportunity with a passion for art, design, and high gloss. Intellectually insecure, he relied on the self-confident baron of taste and flair he had inherited from his father’s circle: Alexander Liberman, Condé Nast’s editorial director. Liberman—Russian-born, like Alexey Brodovitch, his”
― Tina Brown, The Vanity Fair Diaries: Power, Wealth, Celebrity, and Dreams: My Years at the Magazine That Defined a Decade

“To ride the zeitgeist successfully, you have to know when it has turned.”
― Tina Brown, The Vanity Fair Diaries: 1983-1992

“I am sitting across from the Wall Street investor and CEO of CBS, Larry Tisch. He is somewhat more charming than the fleshy gargoyle face would suggest. And he was, I must say, very good humored when he asked me to reach up to the overhead compartment to get down his jacket and I tipped it upside down so all his money and pens and credit cards rained down on his bald head, and he had to grovel around under the seat and retrieve them. I was tempted to hang on to his Amex.”
― Tina Brown, The Vanity Fair Diaries: Power, Wealth, Celebrity, and Dreams: My Years at the Magazine That Defined a Decade

“Carl Spielvogel and his wife, Barbaralee Diamonstein (seriously, you can’t make it up), looked as if they had been married forever but it transpired it was only three years.”
― Tina Brown, The Vanity Fair Diaries: Power, Wealth, Celebrity, and Dreams: My Years at the Magazine That Defined a Decade

“Certainly Gloria Steinem doesn’t seem very full of crusading zeal anymore. I caught sight of her willowy figure and aviator glasses at the party. In a group of other women who surrounded her I heard her say, “We must become the men we wanted to marry.” I loved that.”
― Tina Brown, The Vanity Fair Diaries: Power, Wealth, Celebrity, and Dreams: My Years at the Magazine That Defined a Decade

“In America, success in one field seems to make people think you can do anything. Maybe I will be offered a job as a brain surgeon next.”
― Tina Brown, The Vanity Fair Diaries: Power, Wealth, Celebrity, and Dreams: My Years at the Magazine That Defined a Decade

“As Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan put it when asked to define the eighties, we “borrowed a trillion dollars from the foreigners and used the money to throw a big party.”
― Tina Brown, The Vanity Fair Diaries: Power, Wealth, Celebrity, and Dreams: My Years at the Magazine That Defined a Decade

“Writing brilliant sentences (and editing them) does not have the market value of writing brilliant code, even though, as we learn every day, critical thinking is the DNA of democracy.”
― Tina Brown, The Vanity Fair Diaries: Power, Wealth, Celebrity, and Dreams: My Years at the Magazine That Defined a Decade

“I had lunch with a bunch of posh students Allegra knows, including her boyfriend, a young fogey with a thatch of blond hair and a plummy voice called Boris Johnson.”
― Tina Brown, The Vanity Fair Diaries: Power, Wealth, Celebrity, and Dreams: My Years at the Magazine That Defined a Decade

“Carl Spielvogel and his wife, Barbaralee Diamonstein (seriously, you can’t make it up), looked as if they had been married forever but it transpired it was only three years. I got a clue when she said, “Carl is the best in the world at copy lines, squash, and S-E-X.”
― Tina Brown, The Vanity Fair Diaries: Power, Wealth, Celebrity, and Dreams: My Years at the Magazine That Defined a Decade