God writes a lot of comedy... the trouble is, he's stuck with so many bad actors who don't know how to play funny.

Forget what you learned about poetry in school. (That it's complex, opaque, a problem to be solved in 1500 words by tomorrow.) Poetry is the last preserve of honest speech and the outspoken heart. It holds the cadence of common life. It has a passion for truth and justice and liberty; it is a buoy to people in ordinary trouble: to a friend whose life has gone skidding into the meridian, who has been struck by bad news, who is frying eggs and hash browns and has whiny child clinging to his pant leg.

To choose Norm Coleman over Walter Mondale is like going to a great steakhouse and ordering the tuna sandwich.

If you lived today as if it were your last, you'd buy up a box of rockets and fire them all off, wouldn't you?

America of the future will be all malls connected by interstates. All because your parents no longer can their own tomatoes.

I'm of an age when if I started to do eulogies, I'd be doing nothing else. You don't want to be remembered? I don't want them to be told to remember me.

They say such nice things about people at their funerals that it makes me sad that I'm going to miss mine by just a few days.