“The internet is all about destroying the elite, destroying the gatekeepers. The people know best. You take that to its conclusion, and you get Donald Trump. What do those Washington insiders know? What does the elite know? What do papers like The New York Times know? Listen, the people know what’s r…”— Jonathan Franzen, nytimes.com
“Back To School was a mistake. A calculated song, that has been built up with only one aim in mind: It should be single. I wanted to prove 'em some. They said, we lost our heavyness, and there were no more singles. I wanted to stick this idea up my ass, but then I thought, I'm gonna show those fucker…”— Chino Moreno, deftonesworld.com
“All those bands were really interested in just trying to make different noises with guitars. And at least for us, there was no real pressure to make records that would be played on the radio.”— Neil Halstead, nytimes.com
“Is Donna Tartt the next Charles Dickens? In the end, the question will be answered not by The New York Times, The New Yorker, or The New York Review of Books—but by whether or not future generations read her.”— Evgenia Peretz, vanityfair.com
“The Amazon-Hachette dispute mirrors the wider culture wars that have been playing out in America since at least the 1960s. On the one side, super-wealthy elites employing populist rhetoric and mobilizing non-elites; on the other side, slightly less wealthy elites struggling to explain why their way…”— Keith Gessen, vanityfair.com
“If a big Barnes & Noble had 150,000 books in stock, Amazon had a million! And if Barnes & Noble had taken its books to lonely highways where previously there had been no bookstores, Amazon was taking books to places where there weren’t even highways. As long as you had a credit card, and the postal…”— Keith Gessen, vanityfair.com
“I think stories that get written filter into the culture in ways you have no control over, and our job as writers and editors is to put the best stories together and let them out, like animals from cages, or something happier than caged animals, but that writing and editing are acts of generosity, a…”— Gemma Sieff, 0s-1s.com
“Copyright has always been the best filter for talent, because if it was good, you knew it because you got paid. That is the best formula. Anything else is noise.”— Elizabeth Wurtzel, amazon.com
“The content farmer is the dystopian new journalist, producing online content, typically for a large company, in an attempt to garner more advertising revenue because of the popularity of the topic. Here, the value impartation is done by others (droves, really) via algorithms. Value is thus proportio…”— David Balzer, amazon.com
“The modern writer... accordingly writes for the galleries or, in other words, for that part of the audience which is least capable of judging, but the nosiest in declaring judgment.”— Leigh Hunt, amazon.com
“The way we view the world, the ultimate barometer of quality is: if it gets shared, it's quality. If someone wants to toil in obscurity, if that makes them happy, that's fine. Not everybody has to change the world.”— Emerson Spartz, newyorker.com
“I realized that influence was inextricably linked to impact—the more influence you had, the more impact you could create... The ability to make things go viral felt like the closest that we could get to having a human superpower.”— Emerson Spartz, newyorker.com
“Goethe speaks for the artist, and his own position with regard to standards is quite clear: he represents the humanistic tradition which places responsibility for the fate of culture and individual morality in the hands of the intellectual elite. This elite betrays its mission when it plays up to th…”— Leo Löwenthal, amazon.com
“Popular discrimination is concerned with functionality rather than quality, for it is concerned with the potential uses of the text in everyday life.”— John Fiske, amazon.com
“A major national newspaper could have the highest-paid technology writer in the world. But what happens to that writer when it turns out that the columns read by more, and recommended by most, are written by eighteen-year-old bloggers? The New York Times used to have the power to say who was the mos…”— Lawrence Lessig, amazon.com
“When you have a platform as powerful as what we've invented (a.k.a. the Internet), it is a crying shame when it's used for cat videos.”— Patrick Chung, allthingsd.com
“The discernment involved would be very much like seeing the truth of complex mathematical formulae. Many may fail to perceive such truths, but once seen, such truths are unproblematic. That the many may fail to see such truths in those circumstances cannot count as evidence of the errancy of those t…”— James Gregor, amazon.com