Obama’s the most thoughtful-sounding president I can remember. He seems to be saying what he wants to say, and that is a great relief. He always sounds like he’s thinking about what he’s saying while he’s saying it, and that’s a rare thing in politicians.
Going to Vanderbilt did a lot of things for me, and one of the things it cured me of was the need to follow college football.
Certainly people have said a lot of deeply unfortunate and stupid things in Southern accents, but that doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with the accent itself.
Obama’s got a great sense of humor, but mainly he has a great thinking presence, which is uncommon. It’s hard to imagine being able to do, think over answers and deliver them on television. If I were president I would constantly be spluttering.
New York walking isn’t exercise: it’s a continually showing make-your-own movie.
A picture’s worth a thousand words? A library card’s worth millions.
The first time I walked into a library, I got so excited I almost wet my pants.
I’ve never thought it was necessary to make fun of people – you can find fun in people without necessarily mocking them.
An author is a person who can never take innocent pleasure in visiting a bookstore again.
Many a person has been saved from summer alcoholism, not to mention hypertoxicity, by Dostoyevsky.
In the beginning, Atlanta was without form, and void; and it still is.
To me, letters have always been a robust medium of sublimation. I don’t remember what I was like before I learned my ABC’s, but for as long as I can remember I have made them with my fingers and felt them in my bones.
When money gets too far away from actual, physical, real equity and property it gets too abstract and too distantly derived and then suddenly it’s not worth anything anymore. And the same is true of language.
When I weed, I like to get off into my own head. For one thing, my wife plants and I have trouble telling which plants are weeds and which are my favorite plants. So I tend to hop around and grab the weeds that I know are weeds. So I don’t weed all that linearly. I tend to weed haphazardly.
Any given generation gives the next generation advice that the given generation should have been given by the previous generation but now it’s too late.
Doctors and lawyers must go to school for years and years, often with little sleep and with great sacrifice to their first wives.
I do not Twitter. I don’t want to Twitter, and I don’t see any point in Twittering. The last thing I want to do is tell people what I’m doing at the moment because I’m probably not doing what I’m supposed to be doing.
The legendary yet factual Curtis Wilkie has been the right man in the right place at an uncanny number of extraordinary times.
Usage ain’t always a matter of ought.
If a cat spoke, it would say things like, ‘Hey, I don’t see the problem here.’