Graydon Carter has been editor of Vanity Fair since July 1992. He founded Spy magazine in 1986 with Kurt Andersen and Tom Phillips. He worked as a staff writer for Time, where he covered business, law, and entertainment for five years before joining Life as a staff writer in 1983. Prior to joining Vanity Fair, Mr. Carter was the editor of The New ...
Anna Scott (m. 2005), Cynthia Williamson (m. 1982–2000)
Awards
Raven Award, Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Non-Fiction Special
Star Sign
Cancer
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Quote
1
Not to generalize, but mankind can be divided into three groups. There are those who like to record and share every aspect of their lives no matter how inconsequential. There are those who live lives that are actually worth recording yet don't. And there are the rest of us, the vast sweep of humanity, who neither record our lives nor live ones particularly worth recording. Let's concentrate on the first group. It's a younger, growing demographic, and one reflective of a new movement called Quantified Self. Where past generations had film cameras, scrapbooks, notebooks, and that part of the brain which stores memories, we now have a smartphone app for every conceivable recording need. The thing is, all the time you spend logging and then curating the quotidian aspects of your daily life is time taken away from actually doing things.
2
Christopher Hitchens was a wit, a charmer and a troublemaker, and to those who knew him well he was a gift from, dare I say it, God...That the New York Times ripped up its front page at midnight the day he died to make room for his obituary is a testament to his standing in the world of ideas and letters.
3
[on 21st century American cinema] The essential difference between then and now is that, a half-century ago, movies were geared primarily to adults, and television was aimed primarily at kids. Now it's the reverse.
4
It could fairly be said, given how many Oscars were handed out to non-Americans at this year's [2012] Academy Awards, that it might be time to create a new category: Best American Film. Finding enough contenders could prove difficult, however, if you eliminate much of what the American film has become: an endless succession of sequels, prequels, remakes, movies spun off of action figures or board games, movies with vampires or fire-breathing mutants, bromantic comedies, teenage love sagas and high-minded adaptations of the sort of minimalist, writing-school-inspired fictions that have sent the American novel into a slow, self-admiring death spiral.
5
Financial institutions like to call what they do trading. Let's be honest. It's not trading, it's betting. Now might be the time to stop calling all banks 'banks'. Only institutions that go about the old-fashioned business of taking in deposits from customer A and lending them out to customer B should be called banks. The rest should call themselves what they are. 'Parlors' would be appropriate, or 'dens' - words more suitable to venerable betting pursuits.
6
It's a subtle craft, the art of the playboy - the creation of a life of tasteful public and private pleasure - and it's one that is completely lost on the rich of today. Many men think they're playboys but they invariably land wide of the mark. Surrounding yourself with champagne, fast friends and paid escorts is the very definition of the word 'loser'. Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi looks in the mirror and sees a playboy of the old school And men such as Dominique Stauss-Kahn, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Charlie Sheen no doubt look at Berlusconi and think 'role model'. Women, of course, know otherwise. They see him as an aging, pathetic buffoon.
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Fact
1
Release of his book, "What We've Lost". [2004]
2
Release of his book, "Tales of Hollywood". [2009]
3
Release of his book, "Vanity Fair, the Portraits: A Century of Iconic Images". [2008]
$200,000
