How is it that so often . . . I get the feeling I've worked hard to learn something I already know, or knew, once.

[My father] was generous with his affection, given to great, awkward, engulfing hugs, and I can remember so clearly the smell of his hugs, all starched shirt, tobacco, Old Spice, and Cutty Sark. Sometimes I think I've never been properly hugged since.

Dreck is dreck and no amount of fancy polish is going to make it anything else.

Styles, like everything else, change. Style doesn't.

'These boat people,' says the government of Hong Kong, 'they all want to go to America.' Well, I swear I don't know why, do you? I mean, take Vietnam. Why would any Vietnamese come to America after what American did to Vietnam? Don't they remember My Lai, napalm, Sylvester Stallone?

in television the product is not the program; the product is the audience and the consumer of that product is the advertiser. The advertiser does not 'buy' a news program. He buys an audience.

Pitching was about fooling people, manipulating them, making them believe in something that ultimately wasn't there. Great pitching was great lying.