“I love staying in written correspondence with some writers. That’s enough for me.”

I think all tragedies are best told with some humor. You have to relieve the darkness to let the reader get through it. Also, that life has happiness and sadness mixed together.

We try to impose order, both in our minds and in our conceptions of external reality.

it is sometimes hard to tell what is real. We often invent what isn’t there. Or ignore what is.

I wouldn’t overall say that “The Diagnosis” is a funny book. I would say that it has comic moments. It’s a modern tragedy.

The tragedy of this world is that no one is happy, whether stuck in atime of pain or of joy.

I go to live in Maine for the summer. Without computer, and without the telephone service we are mercifully without the faxes and e-mails.

With infinite life comes an infinite list of relatives. Grandparents never die, nor do great grandparents, great-aunts…and so on, back through the generations, all alive and offering advice.

Tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions happen without the slightest consideration for human inhabitants.

When they are on their cell phones they are not where their bodies are…they are somewhere else in hyperspace. They are not grounded.

Events, once happened, lose reality, alter with a glance, a storm, a night. In time, the past never happened. But who could know? Who could know that the past is not as solid as this instant.

In our constant search for meaning in this baffling and temporary existence, trapped as we are within our three pounds of neurons,

The world is moving faster and faster, but where are we going?I think one of the reasons why things are getting blurry is because there is not much meaning.

I think once we stop asking questions like “what is the age of the universe,” or “how are the instructions of DNA carried out on a microscopic level,” once we stop asking questions like that, we’re dead.

I think what gets you through a small writing project, is just one burst of inspiration.

Despite our strongly felt kinship and oneness with nature, all the evidence suggests that nature doesn’t care one whit about us.

Whenever Obama uses subtleties in discussing a complex issue, he gets creamed.

And the correspondence between them that we have, I mean, she says, “I cannot believe you’re not going to say one word.” And she writes to Walter White, “I’ve asked FDR to say one word. Perhaps he will.” But he doesn’t. And these become very bitter disagreements.

His name never occurs in a single inscription, and it is never found in a single piece of private correspondence. Zero! Zip references!

No public character has ever stood the revelation of private utterance and correspondence.

1992 is not a year I shall look back on with undiluted pleasure. In the words of one of my more sympathetic correspondents, it hasturned out to be an Annus Horribilis.

I value my correspondence with writers…

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.