Face it: a nation that maintains a 72% approval rating on George W. Bush is a nation with a very loose grip on reality.

I talk in subjects and verbs, and sort of wind around in concentric circles until I get far enough away from the beginning so that I can call it the end, and it ends.

...opening up a newspaper is the key to looking classy and smart. Never mind the bronze-plated stuff about the role of the press in a democracy - a newspaper, kiddo, is about Style.

Vacation cruises are advertised as luxurious journeys to exotic places, but a chief pleasure is the reading of books ... . On steamer chairs topside or poolside, in the lounges, everywhere you see men and women with their noses in books, devouring them for hours.

That's why God created marriage, so people wouldn't have to fight with strangers.

You get old and you realize there are no answers, just stories.

A boy wrote me once to say that he loved it when the news from Lake Wobegon came on the radio because it meant that his parents stopped arguing. That was an eye-opener for me. You work hard to polish your act and then you find out that it does people good in ways you couldn't predict.