Brooks clearly lines up on the conservative side, but like Safire, he’s a libertarian conservative, not an evangelical Christian.

If you really hate George Bush, you don’t want to read about his hobbies or that he’s nice to his friends or that he’s good company at dinner.

What do I think about the way most people dress? Most people are not something one thinks about.

But I think it’s undeniable that the Times is a liberal paper.

It’s a very complicated issue about when is a fact not a fact in the context of opinions.

The only real elegance is in the mind; if you’ve got that, the rest really comes from it.

Gail didn’t want me commenting on the opinion pages. I was hired by the news department and, despite the rabid assertions of the Times’ enemies and detractors, the two really have nothing to do with...

Keep public editors around, give readers more access to the editors of the paper, constantly challenge itself, and be aware of its own history.

Pink is the navy blue of India.

I believe the Times is a great newspaper, but a profoundly fallible one.

Now I worry. If people ended up liking me, did I do the job wrong? So I decided they didn’t end up liking me – they ended up being able to deal with me.

Balenciaga did the most delicious evening clothes. Clothes aren’t delicious any more.

I think it’s one of the Times’ problems that they haven’t made it clear to readers what various formats mean.

Now, I think the likelihood of it failing on something like WMD again is very slight because everybody is aware of how we in the press blew it.

Poor, darling fellow – he died of food. He was killed by the dinner table.

I think on civilian casualties they could do more. It’s actually something I’ve discussed with the editors involved. They’re aware of it, and I’m hopeful that there will be more reporting on that.

He was an innovator, an experimenter, a missionary in bringing the gospel of good cooking to the home table.

Right, but there’s expertise and then there’s inside information. And I think we have to make a distinction.

There are many men whose tongues might govern multitudes if they could govern their tongues.

I think Tierney is also more libertarian than he is conservative in the conventional sense.

Man is born to eat.

That first week, I also went to Washington. That was really tough. I sympathize with those Washington figures who have to face 40 Times Washington bureau reporters. They ask hard questions and they’re relentless. And...

A pin has as much head as some authors and a good deal more point.

I was probably being a little cocky, which I do when I feel that I don’t know what I’m talking about.

Blue jeans are the most beautiful things since the gondola.

That the Op-Ed page is very important in readers’ and the nation’s perception of the Times, the perception of its editorial positions, and of its implicit editorial positions as expressed by the publisher’s choice of...

Some people seem as if they can never have been children, and others seem as if they could never be anything else.

I’m afraid we’ll see reporters stop chasing quotes around the same time dogs stop chasing cars.

Elegance is innate. It has nothing to do with being well dressed. Elegance is refusal.

The Times’ new credibility committee report that was issued on Monday very specifically said they will be putting in a policy that reporters must get permission from their department heads to appear on television, which...

I know there are reporters who ridicule pundits.

I’m saying that the WMD reporting was not consciously evil. It was bad journalism, even very bad journalism.

I always wear my sweater back-to-front; it is so much more flattering.

You can certainly go back to any number of stories – early coverage of Vietnam, the Holocaust – to show the press failing to tell the story.

Is the New York Times a Liberal Newspaper? Of course it is.

If there had been three public editors before me, the body might have absorbed it a little bit better.

No one cuts backs like he did. No one knows what a back is anymore.