Baseball happens to be a game of cumulative tension but football, basketball and hockey are played with hand grenades and machine guns.

A lollipop speaking baby talk.

His memoir is a splendid artichoke of anecdotes, in which not merely the heart and leaves but the thistles as well are edible.

Books fall from Garry Wills like leaves from a maple tree in a sort of permanent October.

There are too many ironies in the fire.

He seems to have gone to his icebox, pulled out all the cold obsessions, mixed them in a bowl, beat too lightly and baked too long.

In the cellars of the night, when the mind starts moving around old trunks of bad times, the pain of this and the shame of that, the memory of a small boldness is a hand to hold.

The rich are different from you and me because they have more credit.

Television is a corporate vulgarity.