Like all young reporters - brilliant or hopelessly incompetent - I dreamed of the glamorous life of the foreign correspondent: prowling Vienna in a Burberry trench coat, speaking a dozen languages to dangerous women, narrowly escaping Sardinian bandits - the usual stuff that newspaper dreams are made of.

A railroad station? That was sort of a primitive airport, only you didn't have to take a cab 20 miles out of town to reach it.

Baltimore is permissiveness. The pleasures of the flesh, the table, the bottle, and the purse are tolerated with a civilized understanding.

Except for politics, no business is scrutinized more exhaustively than journalism.

Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it.

The biographer's problem is that he never knows enough. The autobiographer's problem is that he knows too much.

People who say you're just as old as you feel are all wrong, fortunately.