A life of unremitting caution, without the carefree - or even, occasionally, the careless - may turn out to be half a life.

Life is so messy that the temptation to straighten it up is very strong. And the results always illusory.

Being accused of making money by selling sex in Hollywood, home of the casting couch and the gratuitous nude scene, is so rich with irony that it's a better subject for a comic novel than a column.... On one coast the cops are busting sex workers on Eighth Avenue, dragging them downtown to night court where they pay the fine and go right back to their corner; on another they're charging Heidi Fleiss with pandering in a town in which the verb is an art form.

There is a little boy inside the man who is my brother... Oh, how I hated that little boy. And how I love him too.

When hot dogs like Mr. D'Amato or the Republican apologist Roger Ailes say that Whitewater is worse than Watergate, it's because they're suffering from a disease. It's called bull-imia, and it's the regurgitation of patent hyperbole.

The one thing that I always got positive reinforcement for from teachers, who really changed my life, was the written word.

The Statue of Liberty is meant to be shorthand for a country so unlike its parts that a trip from California to Indiana should require a passport.