This is the river of the great 19th-century landscapists; of Cole, Cropsey and Church, and at the end of the summer it lies motionless under the haze as under a light coat of varnish.

Even after several hospitalizations for alcohol and drug-related nervous breakdowns, poet Edna St. Vincent Millay defined sobriety as restricting her daily intake of liquor to a liter and a half of wine.

Insecurity, however, is a luxury on which I never economize.

Conservatives like Palin and Reagan and others do seem to love the series, but so do people of all political stripes and backgrounds. I speak about the series' "radiant simplicity."

The border between editing and ghostwriting is, at its extremes, a bit porous. An editor really improves and sometimes restructures a manuscript and suggests changes.

If you are forced to describe things for someone else, it sharpens your senses. And also your sense of how hard it is to make the translation from the vibrant, multi-faceted world to a sentence that distils it.

Every dreamer knows that it is entirely possible to be homesick for a place you've never been to, perhaps more homesick than for familiar ground.