The genuflection toward 'fairness' is a familiar newsroom piety, in practice the excuse for a good deal of autopilot reporting and lazy thinking but in theory a benign ideal. In Washington, however, a community in which the management of news has become the single overriding preoccupation of the core industry, what 'fairness' has often come to mean is a scrupulous passivity, an agreement to cover the story not as it is occurring but as it is presented, which is to say as it is manufactured.

I was no longer, if I had ever been, afraid to die: I was now afraid not to die.

I have always wanted a swimming pool and never had one.

We all survive more than we think we can.

I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be

Grammar is a piano I play by ear.

I read so ravenously that I would read through whole categories. I was crazy about reading biographies. [...] I think biographies are very urgent to children.