Remote control. Ingenious contradiction of terms. Fits like a handshake. Aims like a gun..

Why, for example, do the great writers use anticipation instead of surprise? Because surprise is merely an instrument of the unusual, whereas anticip….

The Constitution is more than literature, but as literature, it is primarily a work of the imagination. It imagined a country: fantastic. More fantas….

My guess [is] . . . that the great majority of Americans are saying they favor gun control when they really mean gun banishment. . . . I think the c….

One senses, in all autobiography, a straining toward perfection, perfection of a kind that connects the individual with a cosmic pattern which, becau….

Time can be such a menace to a man. By this age do that; by that age do better..

The best in art and life comes from a center - something urgent and powerful, an idea or emotion that insists on its being. From that insistence, a s….

Friends are lights in winter; the older the friend, the brighter the light..

Whatever you think matters - doesn't. Follow this rule, and you will add decades to your life..

The trick in foraging for a tooth lost in coffee grounds is not to be misled by the clumps. The only way to be sure is to rub each clump between your….

If the sad truth be known, writers, being the misfits we are, probably ought not to belong to families in the first place. We simply are too self-int….

There is nothing like a man for bringing out the animal in an animal..

Come September, children return to school, grownups to work, and the brain to the head..

The only reason I wanted 'Making Toast' as the title is that it is a simple gesture of moving on. Every morning there's the bread and you make the to….

If you put anger in the writing, then it's like an actor crying on stage. The audience will not cry with the actor and in some way inure itself again….

The belief in potential human virtue underlies the whole idea of the Bill of Rights; the document is a very tough guardian of that belief..

Slum kids die slowly, their lives eroded at so languid a pace that even they would have trouble tracing the disintegration. To the children of war de….