Schoolteachers seemed determined to persuade me that 'classic' is a synonym for 'narcotic'.

The sinister nature of the American soil is apparent in places like Gettysburg. Fertilize it with the blood of heros, and it brings forth a frozen-custard stand.

After two years studying what rewrite men did with the facts I phoned them, I knew that journalism was essentially a task of stringing together seamlessly an endless series of cliches.

The early commentators who put down the pre-presidential Roosevelt as an empty-headed young lightweight, all ambition and no talent, now seem comically wrong to a modern book-reading, movie-going, television-watching, legend-loving American public conditioned to think of him as one of the presidential giants on the order of Washington and Lincoln.

In America nothing dies easier than tradition.

Listen once in a while. It's amazing what you can hear.

Skinny women don't enjoy being told they're skinny nowadays. They enjoy telling you how they got that way, as though starvation were an achievement.