The talk shows are stuffed full of sufferers who have regained their health--congressmen who suffered through a serious spell of boozing and skirt-chasing, White House aides who were stricken cruelly with overweening ambition, movie stars and baseball players who came down with acute cases of wanting to trash hotel rooms while under the influence of recreational drugs. Most of them have found God, or at least a publisher.

I've decided to skip 'holistic'. I don't know what it means, and I don't want to know. That may seem extreme, but I followed the same strategy toward 'Gestalt' and the 'Twist', and lived to tell the tale.

What interests me is what you might call vernacular writing, writing that connects you to a place.

Health food makes me sick.

Marriage is part of a sort of 50′s revival package that's back in vogue along with neckties and naked ambition.

Once, in Lisbon, I tried my best to work the phone book in a way that would assuage a longing [Alice and I] had for certain Chinese dishes . . . .

Marriage is not merely sharing the fettucini, but sharing the burden of finding the fettucini restaurant in the first place.