I could get a better education interviewing John Steinbeck than talking to an English professor about novels.

The trick is to start early in our careers the stress-relieving avocation that we will need later as a mind-exercising final vocation. We can quit a job, but we quit fresh involvement at our mental peril.

The most successful column is one that causes the reader to throw down the paper in a peak of fit.

English is a stretch language; one size fits all.

The tension between the governed and the governing is what makes the world go 'round. It's not love, it's that tension, because that tension exists in love affairs. The whole idea of control is at the heart of human relationships. Control and resistance to control.

The Latin motto over Poindexter's new Pentagon office reads Scientia Est Potentia - "knowledge is power." Exactly: the government's infinite knowledge about you is its power over you.

The perfect Christmas gift for a sportscaster, as all fans of sports clichés know, is a scoreless tie.