The television anchorman Dan Rather turns up in rag-top native drag in Afghanistan, the surrogate of our culture with his camera crew, intrepid as Sir Richard Burton sneaking into Mecca.

The kiss is a wordless articulation of desire whose object lies in the future, and somewhat to the south.

One can live with the thought of one's own death. It is the thought of the death of the words and books that is terrifying for that is the deeper extinction.

A rattlesnake loose in the living room tends to end all discussion of animal rights.

Over the years, he [Everett Dirksen] developed a style of infinitely subtle fustian, whose effect can still be remotely approximated by sipping twelve-year-old bourbon, straight, while reading Dickens aloud, in a sort of sepulchral purr.

Walter Duranty helped to turn the monster Stalin into a world figure and a hero of the leftistWestern intelligentsia by defending the bloodbath of the Soviet Union from its critics in the now famous: "You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs.

People travel because it teaches them things they could learn no other way.