"The future is an opaque mirror. Anyone who tries to look into it sees nothing but the dim outlines of an old and worried face."

"Watching your daughter being collected by her date feels like handing over a million dollar Stradivarius to a gorilla."

"Archaeology is the peeping Tom of the sciences. It is the sandbox of men who care not where they are going; they merely want to know where everyone else has been."

"A newspaper is lumber made malleable. It is ink made into words and pictures. It is conceived, born, grows up and dies of old age in a day."

"The reporter is the daily prisoner of clocked facts. On all working days, he is expected to do his best in one swift swipe at each story."

"At 19, everything is possible and tomorrow looks friendly."

"When you read about a car crash in which two or three youngsters are killed, do you pause to dwell on the amount of love and treasure and patience parents poured into bodies no longer suitable for open caskets?"

"It is impossible to read for pleasure from something to which you are both father and mother, born in such travail that the writer despises the thing that enslaved him."

"Gimme: an agreement between two losers who can't putt."

"A good writer is not, per se, a good book critic. No more so than a good drunk is automatically a good bartender."

"It is difficult to live in the present, ridiculous to live in the future and impossible to live in the past. Nothing is as far away as one minute ago."

"Scoops of mint ice cream with chips of chocolate cows."

"Books, I found, had the power to make time stand still, retreat or fly into the future."