Comedians and jazz musicians have been more comforting and enlightening to me than preachers or politicians or philosophers or poets or painters or novelists of my time. Historians in the future, in my opinion, will congratulate us on very little other than our clowning and our jazz.

Here is the solution to the American drug problem suggested a couple years back by the wife of our President: "Just say no.

You can't teach people to write well. Writing well is something God lets you do or declines to let you do.

That’s the attractive thing about war,” said Rosewater. “Absolutely everybody gets a little something.

Here's what I think the truth is: We are all addicts of fossil fuels in a state of denial, about to face cold turkey. And like so many addicts about to face cold turkey, our leaders are now committing violent crimes to get what little is left of what we're hooked on.

So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.

Any form of government, not just Capitalism, is whatever people who have all our money, drunk or sober, sane or insane, decide to do today.