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.

The future is an opaque mirror. Anyone who tries to look into it sees nothing but the dim outlines of an old and worried face.

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.

A newspaper is lumber made malleable. It is ink made into words and pictures. It is conceived, born, grows up and dies of old age in a day.

At 19, everything is possible and tomorrow looks friendly.

It is impossible to read for pleasure from something to which you are both father and mother, born in such travail that the writer despises the thing that enslaved him.