It seems to be a law in American life that whatever enriches us anywhere except in the wallet inevitably becomes uneconomic.

It was Queen Elizabeth who made me a foreign correspondent.

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.

Journalism talk is part of the nonstop background noise of American life.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Poetry is so vital to us until school spoils it.

Rereading A.J. Liebling carries me happily back to an age when all good journalists knew they had plenty to be modest about, and were.

Serious journalism need not be solemn.

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

The worst thing about being a tourist is having other tourists recognize you as a tourist.

Usually, terrible things that are done with the excuse that progress requires them are not really progress at all, but just terrible things.

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

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 be Roosevelt never clearly said, probably because he himself didn't know.

Those who remember Washington's cold war culture in the 1980s will recall the shocked reactions to Reagan's intervention. People interested in foreign policy were astonished when in 1985 he met alone at Geneva - alone, not a single strategic thinker at his elbow! - with the Soviet Communist master Gorbachev.

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 about it to his old friend George Murphy, a former senator and actor who had once played Reagan's father in a film.