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.

Washington is a place where people have always been suspect of style and overt sexuality. Too much preening signals that you're not up late studying cap-and-trade agreements.

[On journalists:] We are a noisy, imperfect lot, struggling to scribble what has been called the first draft of history.

Afghanistan is more than the 'graveyard of empires.' It's the mother of vicious circles.

I think Hillary Clinton's a very clever politician but she would be too easy to stereotype the way John Kerry was.

I find having a column a very difficult form of journalism. I'm not a natural like Tom Friedman and Anna Quindlen.

Eric Schmidt looks innocent enough, with his watercolor blue eyes and his tiny office full of toys and his Google campus stocked with volleyball courts and unlocked bikes and wheat-grass shots and cereal dispensers and Haribo Gummi Bears and heated toilet seats and herb gardens and parking lots with cords hanging to plug in electric cars.