In fact, when you get right down to it, almost every explanation Man came up with for anything until about 1926 was stupid.

We should call editorials what they are: columns written by committees.

A hundred years ago, it could take you the better part of a year to get from New York to California; whereas today, because of equipment problems at O'Hare, you can't get there at all.

I do not mean to be the slightest bit critical of TV newspeople, who do a superb job, considering that they operate under severe time constraints and have the intellectual depth of hamsters. But TV news can only present the "bare bones" of a story; it takes a newspaper, with its capability to present vast amounts of information, to render the story truly boring.

The ultimate camping trip was the Lewis and Clark expedition.

Reporters aren't stupid. We were standing around talking about which of the 900 health-care proposals that nobody's going to accept is that day's hot news. They know how silly that is. But that's what they do.

The older I get and the more fiction I write, the more I outline, the more I think about plot before I dive in and plunge too far.