Screw-top wine has improved the quality of life by about ten percent, wouldn't you say?

The Democratic Party represents the American brain, and the Republicans represent not the American heart, or soul, but the American gut. The argument between brain and bowel, everywhere else in the Free World, has been decided long ago in favor of brain. But Americans still - it still divides the nation, this question, here in America.

Everyone is right up there at the very brink of their pain limit.

My 12-year-old daughter said to me, "Enough with the subtitles, Daddy, for crying out loud." Because they always seem to cloud the issue rather than clarify it.

Love is an abstract noun, something nebulous. And yet love turns out to be the only part of us that is solid, as the world turns upside down and the screen goes black.

It's an ancient idea that the leader of a democracy should not be the cleverest but the most average. That's an arguable point, but the world has decided otherwise - except in America, where it still divides the country right down the middle.

For both of us, I think, it had to do with our weakened power to love. It is strange that enslavement should have that effect – not just the fantastic degradation, not just the fear and the boredom and all the rest, but also the layered injustice, the silent injustice. So all right. We’re back where we started. To you, nothing – from you, everything. They took it from me, it seems, for no reason, other than that I value it so much.