Our 'mistakes' become our crucial parts, sometimes our best parts, of the lives we have made.

The things we hate about ourselves aren't more real than things we like about ourselves.

I am a member of a small, nearly extinct minority group, a kind of urban lost tribe who insist, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, on the sanctity of being on time. Which is to say that we On-timers are compulsively, unfashionably prompt, that there are only handfuls of us in any given city and, unfortunately, we never seem to have appointments with each other.

We are told that people stay in love because of chemistry, or because they remain intrigued with each other, because of many kindnesses, because of luck. But part of it has got to be forgiveness and gratefulness.

Today Washington is our Hollywood, the Senate our Warner Bros., the White House our Beverly Hills. People who never read a line of a movie magazine deal with the lives of leaders as if they were Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.

You can fire your secretary, divorce your spouse, abandon your children. But they remain your co-authors forever.

What advertisers call brand loyalty is merely the consumer's defense against the need to waste energy differentiating among things that barely differ.