My ambition was to embrace those general qualities that Ernest Hemingway, a former newspaperman, once said should be present in all good books: 'the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was.'

For those without money, the road to the treasure house of the imagination begins at the public library.

Frank Sinatra was the voice of the 20th-century American city.

Don't tell me about the world. Not today. It's springtime and they're knocking baseball around fields where the grass is damp and green in the morning and the kids are trying to hit the curve ball.

The only way to fight nostalgia is to listen to somebody else's nostalgia

The best newspapermen I know are those most thrilled by the daily pump of city room excitements; they long fondly for a good murder; they pray that assassinations, wars, catastrophes break on their editions.

Human beings want to know too much abut each other, and that's why there are so many lies.