I am in the representational business, a portraitist. I have tried to walk an amused line amid hyperbole, documentary detail, cruel characterisation, occasional affection, some good punchlines and anthropological social insight. It's been a good living.

Michael Wolff

Edward Snowden copied and leaked information from inside the world's most protected spy agency, and then fled to Russia, but yet, because a small part of the data he expropriated was provided to a news organisation, journalism conventions readily accord him lone whistleblower status.

Michael Wolff

War Art Age

Rusbridger had risen at the Guardian through the years when it not only had the support and fail-safe mechanism of the Scott Trust, but guaranteed operating income from public-service advertising. Nobody had to sell anything.

Michael Wolff

Trust Years Year

In America, the new post-postmodern politician is all about authenticity: the daffier you are, the 'realer' you must be. The more you have committed yourself to a ridiculous idea and fevered view, the more worthy you are of attention.

Michael Wolff

Yourself Yours Your

Trump's election was dispiriting and confounding to most traditional political players - perhaps nobody more so than Murdoch. Still, Murdoch did what he has always done: made sure he had maximum influence with the new president.

Michael Wolff

Wit Ways Way

Journalism has become a form of idealism. It is no longer, first and foremost, function, craft, service - it is mission.

Michael Wolff

Vice UN T

Cable television is basically now the business of former political professionals. Joe Scarborough, a former Florida Congressman, is a far more successful cable host than he ever was a politician.

Michael Wolff

Success Car Business

Possibly the defining development of postmodern politics - naturally, an American one - is the separation of personality from ideology. If you are likeable, or at least not disagreeable, if you can strike a personal bond with the electorate, if you reassure rather than disrupt, it doesn't really matter what you stand for.

Michael Wolff

Politics Men You

I can hardly tell you how boring it is to interview almost every politician among the multitudes I have ever interviewed (journalists can't say this, because if people knew how boring politicians were they wouldn't read what we write), how dead the conversation feels, how bald, flat, uninteresting the message is.

Michael Wolff

Age You Write

Reality television is to television what marble and gold are to real estate. The point is to dispense with the idea of taste. It's all id. The more unrestrained the better. We all know that 'reality' in reality television is not real. That anybody who would participate in reality television is a fake. But pretending otherwise makes them real.

Michael Wolff

Art Would Wit

For decades, Trump had no life independent from the media. He became a figure in the nation, and his a monitisable name - albeit quite a ludicrous one - because of his nonstop, relentless, shameless and often embarrassing courtship of the media.

Michael Wolff

Life Use Us

I am old enough to think the word 'journalist' is not all that noble a designation. Journalist - that record keeper, quote taker and processor of press releases - was, in the world of letters I grew up in, a lower-down job. To be a writer - once the ambition of every journalist - was to be the greater truth teller.

Michael Wolff

Truth Great Design

There was, when I came to New York in the 1970s, no more profound or moving experience than MoMA, an almost perfect piece of 20th Century modernist expression, existing in an extraordinary balance - modestly, functionally, elegantly - with the extraordinary art it held. This place changed my life. I was transformed by every visit.

Michael Wolff

Mom Life Experience

I have written periodically for the Guardian for more than a decade.

Michael Wolff

Written Than Ten

One of the secrets of Fox News' outsized success - it's the most profitable news organisation in the U.S. and, quite likely, the world - is that it saw the country full of liberal occupiers and Fox News' viewers as the heroic resistance.

Michael Wolff

Success World Viewers

I am in the representational business, a portraitist. I have tried to walk an amused line amid hyperbole, documentary detail, cruel characterisation, occasional affection, some good punchlines and anthropological social insight. It's been a good living.

Michael Wolff

Men Good Business

I have known Boris Johnson since 2004. I wrote the first big profile about him in the American press. I've been edited by him when he ran the Spectator. I know his family.

Michael Wolff

Family Wrote Ted

One point about understanding Donald Trump is that he is always representing something which has only a casual connection to what he actually is.

Michael Wolff

Which Ways Way

In a career of trying to pry secrets, gossip, specificity and truth out of media executives, Ailes has been the most forthcoming, personal, compelling and honest I've ever dealt with.

Michael Wolff

Truth Car Yin

Galling for left-wing activists and the mainstream media's bottom line - in its way as galling as Fox's daily agitprop - was the fact that liberal media did not have the talent or the savvy or the passion to match conservative media's success.

Michael Wolff

Success Wing Win

Curiously, many Democrats have acceded to Clintonism not because of their cold practicality and political professionalism, but because the Clintons are the sworn enemy of the right. The Clintons, in other words, while hardly being left, have been defined as the opposite of being right - the enemy of my enemy being my friend.

Michael Wolff

Worn Words Word

Unlike financial impropriety, which needs to be proven, a charge of sexual loutishness and aggressiveness in and of itself can finish you off. Does the man match the charge? To be the kind of man who would be accused of being so gross is guilt enough.

Michael Wolff

The Steve Bannon I know - I locate Steve's politics as a Democrat circa 1962.

Michael Wolff

The most characteristic aspects of the Clintons, a political couple who might otherwise largely see themselves as practical-minded centrist consensus builders, is, of course, how much personal hatred they inspire.

Michael Wolff

How advertising is handled has always been a key distinction between low and high order publishing. The higher you stood, the more separate you were from advertising, and, in the logic of snobbery, the greater a premium price the top brands would pay to be in your company.

Michael Wolff

I mean, can Donald Trump get elected again in 2020 without Steve Bannon? I would say no.

Michael Wolff

The emerging notion of the Eighties was that publicity was a currency. The old view was that if you had a currency - your talent or your product - publicity might draw attention to it. The new view was that publicity in itself, highlighting you, bestowed value.

Michael Wolff

Fame, in Trumpian fashion, is war. You are expected to defend your fame; many people want to take it from you.

Michael Wolff

The rise of Donald Trump established a new ground zero for liberal media, requiring no pretence of balance - better yet, with a kind of political brain haemorrhage, everybody seemed to have lost the ability to be balanced.

Michael Wolff

Every journalism bromide - speaking truth to power, comforting the afflicted, afflicting the powerful - that otherwise would be hopelessly sappy to a journalist of any experience, has become a Twitter grail. The true business of journalism has become obscured because there is really no longer a journalism business.

Michael Wolff

Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and George W Bush (and, in their image, Tony Blair) bitterly annoyed their antagonists because they were - at least until the Iraq war caught up with Blair and Bush - Teflon. David Cameron is in this model.

Michael Wolff

All politicians, no matter how gifted, ultimately depend on circumstances for their success.

Michael Wolff

Along with Trump, there are few people, on either the right or the left, who would defend the system. The system is, everyone believes, broken: it's an insider's game; it's totally fixed; it serves itself. Trump codified this into a simple and vivid idea: the swamp.

Michael Wolff

Donald Trump doesn't necessarily stay mad for very long. He's a transactional guy. If you can offer him something, he will take it. Or from a salesman's point of view, if he's not making the sale, you're of no use to him. But if you suddenly come back into the showroom and are willing to buy, he's willing to sell.

Michael Wolff

Indeed, Rusbridger has finessed for the Guardian a certain willing suspension of disbelief and is able to credibly maintain conceits and moral standards to which his own behaviour hardly conforms.

Michael Wolff

I work like every journalist works so I have recordings, I have notes.

Michael Wolff

Politics is a literal game. Every word must represent a strict view - or be so abstract as to be meaningless.

Michael Wolff

If selling had been part of his job description, Rusbridger, who never met a pound he had to earn that didn't disgust him in some visceral way, would have been disqualified long ago. Indeed, his early enthusiasm for the Internet - and a continuing principle of faith for him - was that it was free.

Michael Wolff

A particular modern problem is that megalomania, especially when it involves real estate development, is the disturbance of many faceless men. And a faceless man is a difficult enemy.

Michael Wolff

Before even getting to David Cameron's father here's a starting-point question about the Panama Papers: how is the desire to break the anonymity of Panama banking secrecy different from the FBI's interest in breaking Apple's encryption of the iPhone?

Michael Wolff

The Clintons are one of the most closed political organisations operating in America today. It is a kind of secret society.

Michael Wolff

Voters seem to enjoy voting for what experts believe they won't vote for.

Michael Wolff

One of the anomalies of digital journalism is a lack of clarity between high and low. That's the historic distinction in publishing, mass from class, the vulgar from the refined, tabloid from broadsheet, the penny press from papers costing a nickel.

Michael Wolff

The more power you have, the more surely it will be taken from you before you are ready to give it up.

Michael Wolff

President Donald J Trump and the U.S. media appear now to be split by deep doctrinal differences - of the constitutional crisis kind. But, virtually up until the split, Trump and the media were as one - a perfect symbiosis.

Michael Wolff

Here's a certainty: When you play out your personal dramas, hurt and self-interest in the media, it's a confection. You say what you have to say in the way you have to say it to give it media currency - and that's always far from the truth. Often, in fact, someone else says it for you. It's all planned. It's all rehearsed.

Michael Wolff

Corbyn and Trump don't seem to have anything in common except the assumption on the part of anyone subscribing at any level to the standard thinking that they could never achieve electoral success. They were supposed to doom, if not destroy, their party's future.

Michael Wolff

Culture has no logic.

Michael Wolff

With obvious irony, many of the left-leaning privacy advocates who might cheer Apple's stand against the government's intrusion into its system, are now, as transparency advocates, on the side of the leakers of the Panama Papers.

Michael Wolff

If politics is a game of shrewd and knowing men, Trump has ruined it.

Michael Wolff

If you are identified with certain opinions and an ability to express them, and if you can build yourself an audience, a partisan fan base - measured through social media - then you are an official opinionator, monetizable through books, television contracts and the speaking circuit.

Michael Wolff