Maybe this year, we ought to walk through the rooms of our lives not looking for flaws, but looking for potential.

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.

Forty is ... an age at which people have histories and options. At thirty, they had perhaps less history. At fifty, perhaps fewer options.

My generation is the first in my species to have put fitness next to godliness on the scale of things. Keeping in shape has become the imperative of our middle age. The heaviest burden of guilt we carry into our forties is flab. Our sense of failure is measured by the grade on a stress test.

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

You can teach someone who cares to write columns, but you can’t teach someone who writes columns to care.

Maybe at 20 you can write well, but I don't think you could do what I do. Some things have to happen to you first.