“Gore speaks to America as if English is its second language; George W. speaks as if English is his second language.”

There’s a Washington standard of casually putting things off the record. It’s really gone too far. I don’t know an easy way to turn it back.

I thought writing about somebody current would be a little closer to what I’m used to doing.

When I came back to Washington to be The Times’ chief congressional correspondent in 1991, I was looking for a book subject, and Ted Kennedy stood out for two reasons.

Ted Kennedy’s achievements as a senator have towered over his time, changing the lives of far more Americans than remember the name Mary Jo Kopechne.

Another thing that’s quite different in writing a book as a practicing newspaperman is that if you look at what you’ve written the next morning and you think you didn’t get it quite right, you can fix it.

Four things are laid upon me: to drive out the English; to bring you to be crowned and anointed at Reims; to rescue the Duke of Orléans from the hands of the English; and to raise the siege of Orleans.

I used to say, “Go boldly in among the English,” and then I used to go boldly in myself.

Of the love or hatred God has for the English, I know nothing, but I do know that they will all be thrown out of France, except those who die there.

If your computer speaks English, it was probably made in Japan.

Preachers at black churches are the last people left in the English-speaking world who know the schemes and tropes of classical rhetoric: parallelism, antithesis, epistrophe, synecdoche, metonymy, periphrasis, litotes – the whole bag of tricks.

I read good. I was an English major.

Catchphrases flourish in contemporary American English.

Why do elites hate the poor? It’s xenophobia. They don’t know any poor people – except their off-the-books Brazilian nanny and illegal immigrant cleaning lady from Upper Revolta who don’t speak English.