The best advice I can give anybody about going out into the world is this: Don't do it. I have been out there. It is a mess....

It is fitting that yesteryear's swashbuckling newspaper reporter has turned into today's solemn young sobersides nursing a glass of watered white wine after a day of toiling over computer databases in a smoke-free, noise-free newsroom.

Reality is the only obstacle to happiness.

The charm of television entertainment is its ability to bridge the chasm between dinner and bedtime without mental distraction.

You can't enjoy light verse with a heavy heart.

Voters inclined to loathe and fear elite Ivy League schools rarely make fine distinctions between Yale and Harvard. All they know is that both are full of rich, fancy, stuck-up and possibly dangerous intellectuals who never sit down to supper in their undershirt no matter how hot the weather gets.

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