Gracious dying is a huge, macabre and expensive joke on the American public.

When is conduct a crime, and when is a crime not a crime? When "Somebody Up There" - a monarch, a dictator, a Pope, a legislator - so decrees.

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

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.

One is only really inwardly comfortable, so to speak, after one's life has assumed some sort of shape. Not just a routine, like studying or a job or being a housewife, but something more complete than all those, which would include goals set by oneself and a circle of life-time type friends. I think this is one of the hardest things to achieve, in fact often just trying doesn't achieve it but rather it seems to develop almost by accident.

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

Things on the whole are faster in America; people don't stand for election, they run for office. If a person says he's sick, it doesn't mean regurgitating, it means ill. Mad means angry, not insane. Don't ask for the left-luggage; it's called a checkroom.