A good heavy book holds you down. It's an anchor that keeps you from getting up and having another gin and tonic.

Going to Vanderbilt did a lot of things for me, and one of the things it cured me of was the need to follow college football.

Twitter. It's not a good sound, is it? If it were worth doing, there would be a better word for it.

It was easy to make fun of Bush, but it was sort of like shooting fish in a barrel and it didn't really feel all that good because it was so easy to do. I would much rather live under a thoughtful president. Even if it makes it harder to be funny about politics, it makes it more interesting to be funny about politics.

English is an outrageous tangle of those derivations and other multifarious linguistic influences, from Yiddish to Shoshone, which has grown up around a gnarly core of chewy, clangorous yawps derived from ancestors who painted themselves blue to frighten their enemies.

Somebody informed me recently that the key to every art, from writing to gardening to sculpture, is creativity. I beg to differ.

I've never thought it was necessary to make fun of people - you can find fun in people without necessarily mocking them.