A friendship between reporter and source lasts only until it is profitable for one to betray the other.
If wit is the most sophisticated form of humor, pranks are the most juvenile.
The insane have achieved political respectability while the sane act too good for it all. The irrational celebrate while the rational act bored and above-it-all.
Don’t write anything down, but save everything that anyone else writes down.
Zingers should glow with intelligence as well as drip with contempt.
The idea of American exceptionalism doesn’t extend to Americans being exceptional.
Celebrity is the religion of our time.
Just because digital technology makes connecting possible doesn’t mean you’re actually reaching people.
As blue chips turn into penny stocks, Wall Street seems less like a symbol of America’s macho capitalism and more like that famous Jane Austen character Mrs. Bennet, a flibbertigibbet always anxious about getting richer and her ‘poor nerves.’
For two centuries, the South has feared a takeover by blacks or the feds. In Obama, they have both.
I strained to remember where I was or even what I was wearing, touching my green corduroy jeans and staring at the exposed-brick wall. As my paranoia deepened, I became convinced that I had died and no one was telling me.
We are riveted by the soap operas of public lives. We admire the famous most for what makes them infamous: it reassures us that they are not better and no happier than all the people with their noses pressed hard against the glass.
My eating habits were so bad for many years that I didn’t actually know the intricacies of making a salad.
And as far as doing God’s work, I think the bankers who took government money and then gave out obscene bonuses are the same self-interested sorts Jesus threw out of the temple.
Military guys are rarely as smart as they think they are, and they’ve never gotten over the fact that civilians run the military.
I don’t understand men. I don’t even understand what I don’t understand about men.
Washington is a place where people have always been suspect of style and overt sexuality. Too much preening signals that you’re not up late studying cap-and-trade agreements.
Reagan didn’t socialize with the press. He spent his evenings with Nancy, watching TV with dinner trays. But he knew that to transcend, you can’t condescend.
I find having a column a very difficult form of journalism. I’m not a natural like Tom Friedman and Anna Quindlen.
Everybody is continuously connected to everybody else on Twitter, on Facebook, on Instagram, on Reddit, e-mailing, texting, faster and faster, with the flood of information jeopardizing meaning. Everybody’s talking at once in a hypnotic, hyper din: the cocktail party from hell.