It used to be the custom in this country that when you had made a career and were mature in judgment, you went to the Senate to give something back t the Republic. The idea that at age 25 you go out and buy a blow dryer and starting running for office is not what the founders had in mind

In large Victorian houses with many rooms and heavy doors, the occupants could be mysterious and exciting to one another in a way that those who live in rackety developments can never hope to be. Not even the lust of a Lord Byron could survive the fact of Levittown.

The New York Times is the worst in that hardly anybody can write English over there. Most of it reads like slight translations from the German.

Writing when you are already very old means you have lived through the endings of so many things, you are more aware of the shape life takes. You begin to know Death, you've been close to it. But youth can barely imagine the end of this journey.

Eisenhower managed to begin the Vietnam war by not following his normal instinct of staying out of mischief. In his memoirs, he tells us why we didn't honor the Geneva accords and hold elections in Vietnam: because some 80 percent of the country would have voted for Ho Chi Minh. This is very candid. The sort of thing one might have found in Stalin'smemoirs, had he not made ghosts even of ghosts.

No one reads novels anymore. And I don't see the situation improving. People prefer video games, reality TV, and films. There are so many reasons now not to read novels.

Everybody has two legs, two lobes to the brain which is why we tend to be interested in symmetry, always balancing things.