The only thing I was fit for was to be a writer, and this notion rested solely on my suspicion that I would never be fit for real work, and that writing didn’t require any.

I gave up on new poetry myself 30 years ago when most of it began to read like coded messages passing between lonely aliens in a hostile world.

The best discussion of trouble in boardroom and business office is found in newspapers’ own financial pages and speeches by journalists in management jobs.

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.

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

Gerald Boyd was a classic specimen of the self-made man. Born poor, he worked and studied his way up out of poverty under the guidance of his widowed grandmother.

In an age when the fashion is to be in love with yourself, confessing to be in love with somebody else is an admission of unfaithfulness to one’s beloved.

Don’t try to make children grow up to be like you, or they may do it.

Poetry is so vital to us until school spoils it.

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...

Inanimate objects can be classified scientifically into three major categories; those that don’t work, those that break down and those that get lost.

It was clear soon after his election that Obama, like FDR, wanted to start dealing with the economic crisis immediately after his inauguration.

Kingsley Amis was one of a trio of brilliant comic novelists who made English literature sparkle in the twentieth century.

Except for politics, no business is scrutinized more exhaustively than journalism.

An educated person is one who has learned that information almost always turns out to be at best incomplete and very often false, misleading, fictitious, mendacious – just dead wrong.

Anticipating that most poetry will be worse than carrying heavy luggage through O’Hare Airport, the public, to its loss, reads very little of it.

New York is the only city in the world where you can get run down on the sidewalk by a pedestrian.

When it comes to cars, only two varieties of people are possible – cowards and fools.

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

There is a growing literature about the multitude of journalism’s problems, but most of it is concerned with the editorial side of the business, possibly because most people competent to write about journalism are not...

It was Queen Elizabeth who made me a foreign correspondent.

A group of politicians deciding to dump a President because his morals are bad is like the Mafia getting together to bump off the Godfather for not going to church on Sunday.

Serious journalism need not be solemn.

When speaking aloud, you punctuate constantly — with body language. Your listener hears commas, dashes, question marks, exclamation points, quotation marks as you shout, whisper, pause, wave your arms, roll your eyes, wrinkle your brow.In...

Newspaper people, once celebrated as founts of ribald humor and uncouth fun, have of late lost all their gaiety, and small wonder.

In America nothing dies easier than tradition.

A man writing a letter is a man in the act of thinking, and it was an exercise Reagan obviously enjoyed. After his first meeting with Gorbachev, for example, he sent a ‘Dear Murph’ letter...

Live by publicity, you’ll probably die by publicity.

We watched some of the movie. It was shocking. Sex is apparently hard labor. Various persons supported crushing weights in agonizing positions for what seemed like endless blocks of time. Exhausted men grunted and toiled...

Strategic thinkers were naturally rattled to find this outsider fooling around with their work. They had been thinking strategically when Reagan was just another movie actor playing opposite a chimpanzee, for heaven’s sake. They think...

Journalism was being whittled away by a Wall Street theory that profits can be maximized by minimizing the product.

Caution: These verses may be hazardous to your solemnity.

Like all young reporters – brilliant or hopelessly incompetent – I dreamed of the glamorous life of the foreign correspondent: prowling Vienna in a Burberry trench coat, speaking a dozen languages to dangerous women, narrowly...

People who say you’re just as old as you feel are all wrong, fortunately.

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...

Children rarely want to know who their parents were before they were parents, and when age finally stirs their curiosity, there is no parent left to tell them.

Letter writing was clearly important to Reagan. Even as president he kept dashing off letters to friends, pen pals, media people, statesmen, critics, and the kind of people who write to presidents never expecting a...

It’s always seemed odd to me that after a group of terrorists commits a vile and odious deed they rush messages to the public to claim credit for it.

Roosevelt’s declaration that Americans had ‘nothing to fear but fear itself’ was a glorious piece of inspirational rhetoric and just as gloriously wrong.

The American press has the blues. Too many authorities have assured it that its days are numbered, too many good newspapers are in ruins.

One of the many burdens of the person professing Christianity has always been the odium likely to be heaped upon him by fellow Christians quick to smell out, denounce and punish fraud, hypocrisy and general...

Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it.

My natural instinct after doing something shameful is not to rush into the street boasting about it but to put on dark glasses and head for the next county, hoping nobody notices I’ve been in...

Objects can be classified scientifically into three major categories: those that don’t work, those that break down and those that get lost.

Situation comedy on television has thrived for years on ‘canned’ laughter, grafted by gaglines by technicians using records of guffawing audiences that have been dead for years.

Few expected very much of Franklin Roosevelt on Inauguration Day in 1933. Like Barack Obama seventy-six years later, he was succeeding a failed Republican president, and Americans had voted for change. What that change might...

Ah, summer, what power you have to make us suffer and like it.

In America, it is sport that is the opiate of the masses.

Reporters thrive on the world’s misfortune. For this reason they often take an indecent pleasure in events that dismay the rest of humanity.

Feel good about linking hands in human chain for good causes.