We think of first love as sweet and valuable, a blessed if hazardous condition.

Nicholas Sparks recently went on record as saying he is a greater novelist than Cormac McCarthy. This is true in the same sense that I am a better novelist than William Shakespeare.

Of all the purposes of education, I think the most useful is this: It prepares you to keep yourself entertained. It gives you a better chance of an interesting job.

What a terrible thing it would be to be the Pope! What unthinkable responsibilities to fall on your shoulders at an advanced age! No privacy. No seclusion. No sin.

It is human nature to look away from illness. We don't enjoy a reminder of our own fragile mortality. That's why writing on the Internet has become a lifesaver for me. My ability to think and write have not been affected. And on the Web, my real voice finds expression.

Matthew McConaughey and Kate Hudson star. I neglected to mention that, maybe because I was trying to place them in this review's version of the Witness Protection Program. If I were taken off the movie beat and assigned to cover the interior design of bowling alleys, I would have some idea of how they must have felt as they made this film.

In the best of all possible worlds, directors would obsess about the quality of their storytelling, and not the details of their technical methods.