Article Length Quotes

I had a nice part at big newspapers, small newspapers, and then I went to a very big newspaper - 'The Wall Street Journal.' I wrote longer pieces, and I got tired of working so hard on stories that had a shelf life of essentially one day. So then I started working on longer magazine pieces and realized then that you might as well be writing a book.

Unless you're doing a feature piece, which is going to be longer, and you have more time to get into stuff.

My sweet spot as a writer and, especially, as an essayist is sub-1500 words.

One of the nice things about 'The New Yorker' is they let you write stories that sometimes end up almost half a book.

The longer an article is in the process of manufacture and the more it is moved about, the greater its ultimate cost.

My head aches every time Donald Trump successfully dodges a question with this reoccurring tactic. What's his worst offense? I don't know. How long is this article?

If you're on a contract at 'The New Yorker,' the contract specifies the number of words you will publish in the magazine per year. I get paid by the word, like most writers. That's one reason why the Scientology article was 25,000 words long!

There are only two kinds of stories in the world: those about which I do not care to write as many as 600 words, and those about which I would like to write many more than 600 words. But there is nothing about which I would like to write exactly 600 words.

I think people seem to want to read pieces that are shorter but not as short as the pieces they can read in small bites on the Internet. It may be that the sort of long essays are hitting a sweet spot between the tiny morsels online and the full-length book.