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.

I chose cultural anthropology, since it offered the greatest opportunity to write high-minded balderdash.

If a person survives an ordinary span of sixty years or more, there is every chance that his or her life as a shapely story has ended and all that remains to be experienced is epilogue. Life is not over, but the story is.

Rome wasn't built in a day.

What is my definition of jazz? "Safe sex of the highest order."

Well, there was stuff going on, heroic events. One was what used to be, and probably still is, the largest moving project in history. The headquarters of the Bell Telephone Company used to be brick. What they did was take the old brick building - with the operators in there saying, "Number please" and all that - and they put it through a quarter of a turn and moved it half a block!

Everybody knows that the dumbest people in any American university are in the education department, and English after that.