MICHAEL WOLFF

One thing I can say right off the bat is that creating great editorial is a huge challenge, and you can't help but go through the process and not appreciate how valuable this skill is, and how much I admire the people who do this every day.

If you tweet for me, I'll tweet for you.

I was working at the 'New York Times,' ruing every second of my life, thinking how was I ever going to get out of here, and thinking that one could only do it the way newspaper people have always done it. I needed a scoop, and I would go out and I would dream upon coming upon fires or the sky falling in front of me or anything.

Everybody is promoting something.

I think one of the best jobs in the universe must be being the editor of 'The New Yorker', but there are a number of magazines that I'd be excited to be the editor of. They would be 'Wired', 'The New Yorker' and probably, 'Vogue'.

Everybody is someone else's instrument.

I produced some very good work at 'New York' magazine.

I think there is a real value in an editorial point-of-view and in editorial curation, and in putting together an entire narrative around a set of topics is important.

One of the things about having worked at certain places is that it becomes very hard after you stop working at them to continue a relationship, to continue even reading them. So I must confess that I don't read 'New York' magazine anymore.

What could I have possibly learned except the really most important thing, which is that I did not want to work at the 'New York Times'? Beyond that, I learned how a newspaper works.

While we can all access articles and information in so many places now - across blogs, in newspapers, on video - there is something very powerful about putting it all together into an edited format in a single issue that has a narrative stretching across the themes.

Donald Trump is a family man.

This American right to bear arms with, practically, a Muslim fierceness, sometimes seems as if it must be age-old, an ancient tradition from a tenacious frontier holdover.

If the president of the United States comes after you, you feel concerned.

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.

Bieber is the first mega YouTube star, born inexplicably out of a novel and disruptive medium. It has, of course, always been so for pop culture: feverish bubbles, silly novelty acts and disconcerting new forces impose themselves on a reluctant and condescending media.

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

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.

In business terms, if you take over a company and oust its CEO or fire a divisional chief, you run the place. But in institutional terms, as it happens, it doesn't at all work that 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.

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.

If you run for president and lose, you promote yourself into all sorts of more lucrative, possibly more influential and surely more fun media opportunities.

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.

One of the great business virtues of high publishing was that it was a difficult business to enter. You had to stand for something.

Politics, which really is about the art of expression, ought to be a logical profession for writers (it's very hard to explain to politics- and policy-addicted people that language is the basis of all ideas - if you can't say it, you can't think it), instead of a refuge for lawyers and apparatchiks.