A speech idiosyncrasy, in the same way as an air quote, is really justifiable only if it's employed very sparingly and if the user consciously intends to be using it.
— Christopher Hitchens
When Caroline Kennedy managed to say 'you know' more than 200 times in an interview with the New York 'Daily News,' and on 130 occasions while talking to 'The New York Times' during her uninspired attempt to become a hereditary senator, she proved, among other things, that she was (a) middle-aged and (b) middle class.
The citizens of Tumortown are forever assailed with cures and rumors of cures.
Every now and then I will see a word as if for the first time, and suddenly appreciate that Evian is 'naive' spelled backward, or that Bosnia is an anagram of 'bonsai.'
Read with care, George Orwell's diaries, from the years 1931 to 1949, can greatly enrich our understanding of how Orwell transmuted the raw material of everyday experience into some of his best-known novels and polemics.
To 'choose' dogma and faith over doubt and experience is to throw out the ripening vintage and to reach greedily for the Kool-Aid.
I don't even like showing my stuff to publishers and editors much.
All the time, I've felt that life is a wager and that I probably was getting more out of leading a bohemian existence as a writer than I would have if I didn't.
You can be a Polish American, or an Arab American, or a Greek American but you can't be English American. Why not?
Talking, it seemed to me, was the point of adult existence.
I don't think consensus-building politics is what I'm meant to be doing.
I make preparations both to live and to die every day, but with the emphasis on not dying, and on acting as if I was going to carry on living.
It doesn't take much to make me angry.
I don't think the war in Afghanistan was ruthlessly enough waged.
My own view is that this planet is used as a penal colony, lunatic asylum and dumping ground by a superior civilisation, to get rid of the undesirable and unfit. I can't prove it, but you can't disprove it either.
'Bombing Afghanistan back into the Stone Age' was quite a favourite headline for some wobbly liberals. The slogan does all the work. But an instant's thought shows that Afghanistan is being, if anything, bombed out of the Stone Age.
I don't think Romney is wacky at all, but religion makes intelligent people say and do wacky things, believe and affirm crazy things. Left on his own, Romney would never have said something like the Garden Of Eden was in Missouri, and will be again.
Just as the humble, unassuming, assenting 'O.K.' has deposed the more affirmative 'Yes,' so the little cringe and hesitation and approximation of 'like' are a help to young people who are struggling to negotiate the shoals and rapids of ethnic identity, the street, and general correctness.
I boldly assert, in fact I think I know, that a lot of friendships and connections absolutely depend upon a sort of shared language, or slang. Not necessarily designed to exclude others, this can establish a certain comity and, even after a long absence, re-establish it in a second.
Say 'Toronto' or 'Ontario,' and the immediate thought associations are with a somewhat blander version of North America: a United States with a welfare regime and a more polite street etiquette, and the additionally reassuring visage of Queen Elizabeth on the currency.
When we talk about mortality, we are talking about our children.
Only the aspirants for president are fool enough to believe what they read in the newspapers.
I have more than once in my time woken up feeling like death.
I don't envy or much respect people who are completely politicised.
In the brute physical world, and the one encompassed by medicine, there are all too many things that could kill you, don't kill you, and then leave you considerably weaker.
The Islamists will try to spoil everything for everyone.
In the grip of a neurological disorder, I am fast losing control of words even as my relationship with the world has been reduced to them.
I feel Anglo-American.
The violence in the Bible is appalling.
The great thing about the United States and the historically magnetic effect it has had on a lot of people like me is its generosity, to put it simply.
Henry Kissinger should have the door shut in his face by every decent person and should be shamed, ostracized and excluded.
I became a journalist partly so that I wouldn't ever have to rely on the press for my information.
Knowing that we are primates, I think, is a fascinating discovery, and a very interesting and rather cheering one.
It's surprising to me how many of my friends send Christmas cards, or holiday cards, including my atheist and secular friends.
Many parents and teachers have become irritated to the point of distraction at the way the weed-style growth of 'like' has spread through the idiom of the young. And it's true that in some cases the term has become simultaneously a crutch and a tic, driving out the rest of the vocabulary as candy expels vegetables.
Lovers often invest their first meetings with retrospective significance, as if to try to conjure the elements of the numinous out of the stubborn witness of the everyday.
When you hear people demanding that the Ten Commandments be displayed in courtrooms and schoolrooms, always be sure to ask which set. It works every time.
Like the experience of warfare, the endurance of grave or terminal illness involves long periods of tedium and anxiety, punctuated by briefer interludes of stark terror and pain.
Owners of dogs will have noticed that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they will think you are God. Whereas owners of cats are compelled to realize that, if you provide them with food and water and affection, they draw the conclusion that they are God.
I didn't think Marilyn Monroe was beautiful. It used to worry me. I thought maybe I'm not put together like the other chaps.
Beautiful sentences pop into my head. Beautiful sentences that aren't always absolutely accurate. Then, I have to choose between the beautiful sentence and being absolutely accurate. It can be a difficult choice.
'WASP' is the only ethnic term that is in fact a term of class, apart from redneck, which is another word for the same group but who are in the lower social strata, so it's inexplicably tied up with social standing and culture and history in a way that the other hyphenations just are not.
I felt Clinton represented the worst of the 1960s.
Literature, not scripture, sustains the mind and - since there is no other metaphor - also the soul.
I think I write in a fairly self-confident manner.
There are all kinds of stupid people that annoy me but what annoys me most is a lazy argument.
The cause of my life has been to oppose superstition. It's a battle you can't hope to win - it's a battle that's going to go on forever. It's part of the human condition.
George Bush made a mistake when he referred to the Saddam Hussein regime as 'evil.' Every liberal and leftist knows how to titter at such black-and-white moral absolutism.
To be in opposition is not to be a nihilist.
The suicide-bombing community is not absolutely 100 percent religious, but it is pretty nearly 100 percent religious.
