If you ever meet someone who cannot understand why solitary confinement is considered punishment, you have met a misanthrope.

In social matters, pointless conventions are not merely the bee sting of etiquette, but the snake bite of moral order.

There is nothing wrong with "women's studies" that studying the right women can't cure, but feminist literary scholars have a penchant for dragging the rivers of deserved obscurity for third-rate neurotics.

The proliferation of support groups suggests to me that too many Americans are growing up in homes that do not contain a grandmoth.

By sending the contradictory message that the famous are just plain folks on Mount Olympus, America has forged a relentless tension between loftiness and accessibility. Stir in the fact that the inborn talent and intelligence needed to achieve fame are immune to distributive tinkering by government programs and you have a definition of fame certain to produce envious rage: somebody screwed democracy.

Agoraphobia was my quirky armor against a gregarious America.

"Very" is the most useless word in the English language and can always come out. More than useless, it is treacherous because it invariably weakens what it is intended to strengthen. For example, would you rather hear the mincing shallowness of "I love you very much" or the heart-slamming intensity of "I love you"?