A golf ball can stop in the fairway, rough, woods, bunker or lake. With five equally likely options, very few balls choose the fairway.

Gimme: an agreement between two losers who can't putt.

A good writer is not, per se, a good book critic. No more so than a good drunk is automatically a good bartender.

Watching your daughter being collected by her date feels like handing over a million dollar Stradivarius to a gorilla.

What makes a good writer of history is a guy who is suspicious. Suspicion marks the real difference between the man who wants to write honest history and the one who'd rather write a good story.

Raising a child is very much like building a skyscraper. If the first few stories are slightly out of line. no one will notice. But when the building is 18 or 20 stories high, everyone will see that it tilts.

At 19, everything is possible and tomorrow looks friendly.