Books are personal, passionate. They stir emotions and spark thoughts in a manner all their own, and I'm convinced that the shattered world has less hope for repair if reading becomes an ever smaller part of it.

I wanted us to be careful about, going to the corner diner, interviewing three people and saying, here's the mood of the public.

I think the media has to continually remind itself, and I think we do but sometimes not well enough that we're not just an economic property.

In some perfect world where human nature is less messy and history less fraught, any and all people who had ever suffered discrimination would find common cause, gathering together under one big anti-bigotry banner.

[Gore] tended to drone on and on, in singsong, narcotizing cadences best endured by the heavily caffeinated.

Campaigns waged with lies presage governments racked by distrust. The sclerosis starts there.

I suppose there are people who can pass up free guacamole, but they're either allergic to avocado or too joyless to live.

Shiatsu, deep-tissue or maybe even Rolfing: Which manner of pummeling becomes a cephalopod most?

If you look at why do we end up with the nominees that we get often? It's because you have only a very small number of Americans participating in the primaries, and those people tend to be your most dyed in the wool partisans.

Are you telling me that the polite little note I sent my college alumni magazine has, by some unbeknownst series of errors, come to be printed in The Paper of Record, instead? What a fiasco!

Another way in which our system is unfair. Why do Iowans get so much of a bigger voice every four years than everybody else? Ditto for New Hampshire. There are proposals and it could well happen that we could have a rotating calendar where different years different states went first. I would endorse that.

If every four years in a presidential election, if you're a New Yorker or a Californian, and you realize that you are so much less important, that nobody is actually kind of targeting your needs because they're laser-focused on what will play in Florida and on what will play in Virginia.

But fairness is where we’re heading, at least in regard to marriage, which has emerged as the terrain on which Americans are hashing out their feelings about gays and lesbians. The trajectory is undeniable. The trend line is clear. And the choice before the justices is whether to be handmaidens to history, or whether to sit it out.