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.
If it's a beautiful day, I love taking walks. The walks are always aimless.
The replenishing thing that comes with a nap - you end up with two mornings in a day.
For those without money, the road to that treasure house of the imagination begins at the public library.
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.
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.
The Anarchists set off World War I with a gunshot in Sarajevo - but they faded away. It wasn't that the police drove them out of business. The ideology had nowhere to go except into permanent negativity.
I was the oldest of seven kids, so I had no older brother who would say, 'Schmuck, don't do that.'
The blogosphere might be very useful as propaganda or as therapy. But it's not journalism.
In the newspaper business, I was in the last generation before the arrival of the personnel manager. You were hired by editors - and editors who would take a chance on what they perceived to be talent and not hire a resume.
The most powerful force in American politics is not anger, it's nostalgia.
For me reading a book is what I like doing, curled up in a corner in a comfortable chair.
At the beginning of writing fiction, too much of the newspaper style was getting into the prose, so I thought, 'Gee, I should try writing longhand. Maybe I can tap something that goes back to the point before I could type.'
Boxing is one of those leftovers from a more primitive past that should be finished off and killed. I don't love it anymore.
I always make a distinction between nostalgia and sentimentality. Nostalgia is genuine - you mourn things that actually happened.
Across the years, in spite of everything I knew, my passion endured. Newspapers and magazines paid me to cover fights when I'd have paid my own way.
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 years, the defenders of television have argued that the networks are only giving the people what they want. That might be true. But so is the Medellin cartel.
My father lost his leg in 1927 playing soccer. A kick broke his leg; gangrene set in. They sawed it off. So he didn't get what a lot of Irish immigrants got, which was a job on the Waterfront - he didn't get that.
Nothing surprises me, particularly men and their propensity to be fools.
