Administration policies seem to tacitly encourage those who live below sea level in New Orleans to relocate permanently, to leave the dangerous water's edge for more prosperous inland cities such as Shreveport or Baton Rouge.

New Orleans is just a microcosm of Newark and Detroit and hundreds of other troubled urban locales.

The world of high-stakes international diplomacy can be rough and tumble, but it's more often than not a procession of suits and summits, protocol sessions and photo ops.

Broadcast radio was entering its own golden age during the Depression, with live programming on stations all through the day. Local stations needed singers, musicians, announcers, and whipcord personalities, along with Christian clergy to give prayers and pundits to speak on world affairs.

Theodore Roosevelt had been enthralled with the idea of Texas since 1883, when he arrived in the Dakota Territory to ranch cattle.

With the newspapers cheering, Lieutenant Colonel Roosevelt chose a top-notch regiment of more than 1,250 men. They were first called Teddy's Texas Tarantulas and went through three or four other monikers until Roosevelt's Rough Riders stuck.

Stubbornness is a positive quality of presidential leadership - if you're right about what you're stubborn about.

There is no real way to categorize McLean's 'American Pie' for its hybrid of modern poetry and folk ballad, beer-hall chant and high-art rock.

Influenced by Pete Seeger and the Weavers, McLean proudly wore the mantle of troubadour in the early 1970s, when 'American Pie' topped the Billboard charts, and has never shed the cape.

What makes 'American Pie' so unusual is that it isn't a relic from the counterculture but a talisman, which, like a sacred river, keeps bringing joy to listeners everywhere. When 'American Pie' suddenly is played on a jukebox or radio, it's almost impossible not to sing along.

The time you feel lonely is the time you most need to be by yourself.

People are pretty forgiving when it comes to other people's families. The only family that ever horrifies you is your own.

One of the cruelest things you can do to another person is pretend you care about them more than you really do.

Long lives aren't natural. We forget that senior citizens are as much an invention as toasters or penicillin.

Too much free time is certainly a monkey's paw in disguise. Most people can't handle a structureless life.

If human beings had genuine courage, they'd wear their costumes every day of the year, not just on Halloween.

Nothing very very good and nothing very very bad ever lasts for very very long.

A ring is a halo on your finger.

Blame is just a lazy person's way of making sense of chaos.

Cloning is great. If God made the original, then making copies should be fine.

Every single moment is a coincidence.

You can't fake creativity, competence, or sexual arousal.

Birds are a miracle because they prove to us there is a finer, simpler state of being which we may strive to attain.

If you have an impulse to kindness, act on it.

You can't get mad at weather because weather's not about you. Apply that lesson to most other aspects of life.

There's much to be said for feeling numb. Time passes more quickly. You eat less, and because numbness encourages laziness, you do fewer things, good or bad, and the world's probably a better place for it.

Making eye contact with adults while dressed as a clown is risky.

Eagles are seagulls with a good hairdo.

Everyone should have a tailor. David Wilkes, the guy who does my stuff, is like, 'Well you're a writer - do you want a special pen compartment or something?' Bespoke: That's the term you want to get out there.

Forget sex or politics or religion, loneliness is the subject that clears out a room.

Storytelling is ultimately a creative act of pattern recognition. Through characters, plot and setting, a writer creates places where previously invisible truths become visible. Or the storyteller posits a series of dots that the reader can connect.

Royalty is either going to do very well with cloning, or it's going to disappear completely.

Adventure without risk is Disneyland.

If you're not a tree hugger, then you're a what, a tree hater?

In a faraway land called 'pre-2000,' what Earthlings now call blogging was called 'keeping a diary.' It's hard work to do well. I tried doing it in the early 1990s but had to stop because I no longer had a life - instead I had this thing that generated anecdotes to go into my diary. The diary took over and I had to stop.

Much of what we now consider 'personality' will be explained away as structural and chemical functions of the brain.

I don't want any vegetables, thank you. I paid for the cow to eat them for me.

The capacity for not feeling lonely can carry a very real price, that of feeling nothing at all.

I like being surrounded by good ideas. Every single time you walk past something you like, you get a blast of happy chemicals to the brain, and I like that.

Never loan a book to someone if you expect to get it back. Loaning books is the same as giving them away.

A bland smile is like a green light at an intersection, it feels good when you get one, but you forget it the moment you're past it.

Fashionable people can opt out of the fashion stream, but a stylish person never becomes unstylish unless they hit their head on a rock and suffer brain damage.

When the world throws you too much information, the only way you can stay sane or survive is to look for pattern recognition. Amidst all the blurs, is there a constellation that emerges, is there a straight line that's emerging?

Every human being you see in the course of a day has a problem that's sucking up at least 70 percent of his or her radar.

Depression is when you have lots of love, but no one's taking.

I don't think I see the world in terms of stupid or clever, but in terms of being able to get irony. There's some awful statistic about only 20 per cent of Americans being able to understand irony.

The modern economy isn't about the redistribution of wealth, it's about the redistribution of time.

Before machines the only form of entertainment people really had was relationships.

I was so beautiful when I was young. And I took so few photos because I felt so skinny and ugly. I wish I'd just taken a few more shots.

Ten commandments yet seven deadly sins: conflict?