Enemies are, to me, as important as friends in my life, and when they die I mourn their passing.

It is somehow reassuring to discover that the word travel is derived from travail, denoting the pains of childbirth.

Alas, poor Yorick! How surprised he would be to see how his counterpart of today is whisked off to a funeral parlor and is in short order sprayed, sliced, pierced, pickled, trussed, trimmed, creamed, waxed, painted, rouged and neatly dressed - transformed from a common corpse into a Beautiful Memory Picture.

In childbirth, as in other human endeavors, fashions start with the rich, are then adopted by the aspirant middle class with an assist from the ever-watchful media, and may or may not eventually filter down to the poor.

Picking other people's brains is an art worth cultivating.

I have nothing against undertakers personally. It's just that I wouldn't want one to bury my sister.

the whole point of muck-raking, apart from all the jokes, is to try to do something about what you've been writing about. You may not be able to change the world but at least you can embarrass the guilty.