Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
Anonymous Former Intelligence Officer, on negotiation
"Know what you want - and remember that whatever your bottom line is, there's always another line below that"
Barney Frank, on JP Morgan's $2bn trading loss
"JP Morgan Chase, entirely without any help from the government has lost, in this one set of transactions, five times the amount they claim financial regulation is costing them"
"It's amazing what you can achieve if you don't care who gets the credit"
"How can anyone govern a nation that has 246 different kinds of cheese?"
"If someone asked me to prove my undying love for my daughter, I would tell him that I have pretended to be over 50 different Pokémon characters. I have watched an entire Pokémon Advanced Battle DVD, which is essentially like roasting your soul on a spit"
"There’s always a fine sadness about Milan’s economic power, as if this isn’t quite what Italians would ever want a city to be"
Adam Gopnik, on Nicolas Sarkozy
"People will forgive a short man with a beautiful wife if he seems sufficiently surprised; Sarkozy seemed merely showy"
Bubba Watson, having a Forrest Gump moment
"That's the best part about history - we don't know what's going to happen"
"When Elena Kagan was sworn in as a Supreme Court Justice, did her mother murmur, 'Maybe she’ll meet someone'?"
Adam Gopnik, on the Jets signing Tebow
"This is one of those moves so puzzling, so bizarre, so counter-productive and incomprehensible, that, to borrow a line from Bill James, it seems like the kind of thing that should be phoned in anonymously from an unknown caller, rather than announced in a press release"
"We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next 10"
Simon Hoggart, on restaurant chains
" 'Have you been to a Harvester before?' they ask, to which Jeremy Hardy says the only reply is 'surely nobody comes here twice?'"
"Never before in the history of our Republic have so few spent so much to influence the votes of so many"
Felisa Rogers, on aphrodisiacs
"Humans tend to get turned on by three categories of food: extremely expensive food, food that is risky to acquire, and food that resembles genitalia"
"As we all know from our Blackberries, work invades leisure; but as we also all know from our iPhone, leisure invades work"
"If you base your entire candidacy on your ability to beat Barack Obama in a debate, you damned well better be able to beat Mitt Romney"
"I always feel overappreciated but underestimated"
"The Third Reich has done more for British bookselling than the national curriculum"
"Two writers, alone in a room, will talk about royalties not art"
"The only lost cause is one we give up on before we enter the struggle"
