He steps on stage and draws the sword of rhetoric, and when he is through, someone is lying wounded and thousands of others are either angry or consoled.

Journalism is a team sport. Writing novels is golf: it's you and the ball.

I was born in 1935. But my mother and father - who were immigrants from Ireland - and everybody that I knew growing up in Brooklyn came out of the Depression, and they were remarkable people.

The blogosphere might be very useful as propaganda or as therapy. But it's not journalism.

What would Chaucer have written about if men were perfect?

I always make a distinction between nostalgia and sentimentality. Nostalgia is genuine - you mourn things that actually happened.

All good sports reporters know that the best stories are in the loser's locker room.

In 1962, I wrote a series about 42nd Street called 'Welcome to Lostville.' One result was that the young Bob Dylan read it and invited me to his first concert at Town Hall; the result was a kind of friendship that years later led to my liner notes for 'Blood on the Tracks.'

For those without money, the road to that treasure house of the imagination begins at the public library.

You can't be a reporter using Google. It can be a tool. But you have to get out of the house.

For me reading a book is what I like doing, curled up in a corner in a comfortable chair.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez was a newspaperman originally in Colombia. He talked about - and I agree - how everybody has a public life, a private life, and a secret life.

There is a growing feeling that perhaps Texas is really another country, a place where the skies, the disasters, the diamonds, the politicians, the women, the fortunes, the football players and the murders are all bigger than anywhere else.

Everybody who went to Vietnam carries his or her own version of the war. Only 10 percent engaged in combat; the American elephant, pursuing the Vietnamese grasshopper, was extraordinarily heavy with logistical support.

I was the oldest of seven kids, so I had no older brother who would say, 'Schmuck, don't do that.'

The replenishing thing that comes with a nap - you end up with two mornings in a day.

The most powerful force in American politics is not anger, it's nostalgia.

If it's a beautiful day, I love taking walks. The walks are always aimless.

I don't ask for the meaning of the song of a bird or the rising of the sun on a misty morning. There they are, and they are beautiful.

Undeniably, we were on God's side in World War II and the Cold War. But were we ourselves without sin in those just struggles?

The problem with some of our noisier exponents of 'American exceptionalism' is that they lack Reagan's moral maturity.

Secularist justices de-Christianized our country. They invented new rights for vicious criminals as though criminal justice were a game. They tore our country apart with idiotic busing orders to achieve racial balance in public schools.

While our bipartisan establishment worships diversity, Trump saw Middle America recoiling from the demographic change brought about by Third World invasions. And he promised to curb them.

Bullying is something every kid in public, parochial, or private school has witnessed by graduation. While unfortunate, it is part of growing up.