As a former English major, I am a sitting duck for Gift Books, and in the past few years I've gotten Dickens, Thackeray, Smollet, Richardson, Emerson, Keats, Boswell and the Brontes, all of them Great, none of them ever read by me, all of them now on a shelf, looking at me and making me feel guilty.

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

Humor is not a trick, not jokes. Humor is a presence in the world - like grace - and shines on everybody.

All solutions are temporary, so why not go for duct tape?

Travel is the art form available to Everyman. You sit in the coffee shop in a strange city and nobody knows who you are, or cares, and so you shed your checkered past and your motley credentials and you face the day unarmed ... And onward we go and some day in the distant future, we will stop and turn around in astonishment to see all the places we've been and the heroes we were.

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.

The highlight of my childhood was making my brother laugh so hard that food came out of his nose.