Take it from somebody who has been around for a million years: When you get right down to it, food is practically the whole story every time.

I saw the destruction of Dresden. I saw the city before and then came out of an air-raid shelter and saw it afterward, and certainly one response was laughter. God knows, that's the soul seeking some relief.

Powers Hapgood had just come from court because there was some kind of dust-up on a picket line. The judge was so curious about him - coming from a rich family - why he would choose to live as he had. I guess you know what his answer was ..."The Sermon on the Mount, sir." That's important.

Why were so many Americans treated by their government as though their lives were as disposable as facial tissues? Because that was the way authors customarily treated bit-part players in their made-up tales.

Before you kill somebody, make absolutely sure he isn't well connected. So it goes.

The German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, who had syphilis, said that only a person of deep faith could afford the luxury of religious skepticism. Humanists, by and large educated, comfortably middle-class persons with rewarding lives like mine, find rapture enough in secular knowledge and hope. Most people can't.

Traveling is like dancing lessons from God.