People and places are the twin pillars on which most nonfiction is built. Every human event happens somewhere, and the reader wants to know what that somewhere was like.

Today the outlandish becomes routine overnight. The humorist is trying to say that it's still outlandish.

If you would like to write better than everybody else, you have to want to write better than everybody else. You must take an obsessive pride in the smallest details of your craft. And you must be willing to defend what you've written against the various middlemen - editors, agents and publishers - whose sights may be different from yours, whose standards not so high.

But nothing has replaced the writer. He or she is still stuck with the same old job of saying something that other people will want to read.

Much of my writing has taken the form of a pilgrimage: to sacred places that represent the best of America, to musicians and other artists who represent the best of their art.

Editors are licensed to be curious.

Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill rode to glory on the back of the strong declarative sentence.