Zingers should glow with intelligence as well as drip with contempt.

Reagan didn't socialize with the press. He spent his evenings with Nancy, watching TV with dinner trays. But he knew that to transcend, you can't condescend.

It takes a lot of adrenaline and fear to make me actually write.

When I need to work up my nerve to write a tough column, I try to think of myself as Emma Peel in a black leather catsuit.

I think even the Hollywood money people are saying they've got to get the party back from the Clinton wing. They can't, you know, keep nominating these Northeast liberals. They have to look for people who can win.

I strained to remember where I was or even what I was wearing, touching my green corduroy jeans and staring at the exposed-brick wall. As my paranoia deepened, I became convinced that I had died and no one was telling me.

The Mayans were right, as it turns out, when they predicted the world would end in 2012. It was just a select world: the G.O.P. universe of arrogant, uptight, entitled, bossy, retrogressive white guys. [...] Instead of smallpox, plagues, drought and Conquistadors, the Republican decline will be traced to a stubborn refusal to adapt to a world where poor people and sick people and black people and brown people and female people and gay people count.