One of the great changes wrought by the increased public awareness of Alzheimers - and thank you, Nancy Reagan, you wonderful tough old dame, you - is that people in the early stages of the disease are now speaking out while they still have the capacity to do so.

The institutions of college athletics exist primarily as unreality fueled by deceit. The unreality is that universities should be in the business of providing large spectacles of mass entertainment. The fundamental absurdity of that notion requires the promulgation of the various deceits necessary to carry it out.

Campaigns are no longer high-minded exchanges of ideas, even though God knows we need more good ones - ideas, that is.

We create our own government. We are responsible for its beauty and for its ugliness. We are responsible for its glories and for its failures and, most important, we are responsible for amending those failures no matter who are their most immediate architects.

Optimism....is neither weak nor naive. It can be tough and pure and earned just as clearly as any brooding existential despair.

As a writer, I have to admit, there is something darkly compelling about Alzheimer's because it attacks the two things most central to a writer's craft - language and memory, which together make up an individual's identity. Alzheimer's makes a new character out of a familiar person.

It's better to be black than gay because when you're black you don't have to tell your mother.