It was dramatic to watch my grandmother decapitate a turkey with an ax the day before Thanksgiving. Nowadays the expense of hiring grandmothers for the ax work would probably qualify all turkeys so honored with gourmet status.

Journalism talk is part of the nonstop background noise of American life.

Every day and in every way, baseball gets fancier. A few more years and they'll be playing on oriental rugs.

After that [father's death] I never cried with any real conviction, nor expected much of anyone's God except indifference, nor loved deeply without fear that it would cost me dearly in pain. At the age of five I had become a skeptic and began to sense that any happiness that came my way might be the prelude to some grim cosmic joke.

The twentieth century seems afflicted by a gigantic... power failure. Powerlessness and the sense of powerlessness may be the environmental disease of the age.

A day spent praising the earth and lamenting man's pollutionist history makes you feel like a superior, sensitive soul.

It was Queen Elizabeth who made me a foreign correspondent.