Because there is no cosmic point to the life that each of us perceives on this distant bit of dust at galaxy's edge, all the more reason for us to maintain in proper balance what we have here. Because there is nothing else. Nothing. This is it. And quite enough, all in all.

Love, like a sense of humor, is now claimed by everyone even though Love, like a sense of humor, is rather more rare than not, and to most of us poor muddlers unbearable at full strength.

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.

Somebody has to keep score and I decided I was going to do it. I'm a born score-keeper and I realize, like an umpire, that my decisions may cause distress.

Then die. We must all do that. But die, as they say, game.

I suspect that one of the reasons we create fiction is to make sex exciting.

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.