The other feature is a gymnasium named after another dead politician who was gifted with fast and extremely sure hands.

Men in the uniform of Wall Street retirement: black Chesterfield coat, rimless glasses and the Times folded to the obituary page.

When you leave New York you ain't going anywhere.

True New Yorkers do not really seek information about the outside world. They feel that if anything is not in New York it is not likely to be interesting.

You see, the Mets are losers, just like nearly everybody else in life. This is the team for the cab driver who gets held up and the guy who loses out on a promotion because he didn't maneuver himself to lunch with the boss enough. It is the team for every guy who has to get out of bed in the morning and go to work for short money on a job he does not like. The Yankees? Who does well enough to root for them, Laurence Rockefeller?

The office of president is a bastardized thing, half royalty and half democracy that nobody knows whether to genuflect or spit.

Politics: where fat, bald, disagreeable men, unable to be candidates themselves, teach a president how to act on a public stage.