Gene Weingarten
I have two favorites: Reading Kierkegaard while listening to Mozart's Piano Concerto 9 in E Flat Major, and reading early Bazooka Joe comics in Hebrew.
The Pulitzer is a crapshoot. Your piece has to hit a few people the right way at the right moment.
The whole point of corporate mascots is to be distinctive. No one in his right mind would ever confuse the Hamburglar with Mayor McCheese.
I felt like I was never going to be a great writer. I felt like I was going to be a good writer at best. I wanted to be great at something.
Sometimes, homely things are done for the best reasons in the world and thus achieve a beauty of their own.
Because I live and work in Washington, D.C., I have a ringside seat at the world capital of The Persuasive Arts, or, as I like to call it, The Opinions Racket.
While it is true that many hep C victims became infected through blood transfusions or organ transplants or in other innocent ways, mine was contracted during my college years, when I showed as much care for my personal health as your average suicide bomber.
When you are interviewing someone, don't just write down what he says. Ask yourself: Does this guy remind you of someone? What does the room feel like? Notice smells, voice inflection, neighborhoods you pass through. Be a cinematographer.
When she was too young to resist, or even to understand, I turned my daughter into a lifelong, rabid Yankees fan.
I am the most skilled parallel parker the world has ever known.
For $60, I once bought a neck massage at a 'massage parlor' that advertised in 'The Washington Post.'
I think we too often go soft in trying to spare people the agony of confronting reality.Collection: Thinking
Mostly, you become a writer not because you want to get rich or famous, but because you have to write; because there is something inside that must come out.Collection: Writing
We want to believe that the world is understandable and controllable and unthreatening, that if we follow the rules, we'll be okay. So, when this kind of thing happens to other people, we need to put them in a different category from us. We don't want to resemble them, and the fact that we might is too terrifying to deal with. So, they have to be monsters.Collection: Believe
Politics is how you think about life itself.Collection: Thinking
The one thing an aspiring writer must understand is that it's hard. If you think it's not hard, you're not doing it right.Collection: Writing
The verb "Garland" should be created. It would mean to unfairly put a stinking albatross around someone's neck, to make him unemployable.Collection: Mean
It is a cliche, and it is also true, that humor springs from existential pain - from a need to blunt the awareness that life is essentially a fatal disease of unpredictable symptoms and unknown duration.Collection: Pain
America is an incredibly polarized country politically. I think ANY Republican would start out with 42 percent of the vote.Collection: Country
The horrifying thing is that nearly half of America seems in synch with xenophobia and race-baiting.Collection: Xenophobia
One thing I am learning from the kitten is that everything he is doing seems to be in preparation for murder.Collection: Preparation
Donald Trump is a boor, and cannot stop being a boor.Collection: Trump
I once found myself driving, smoking a cigar, taking notes, and talking on the phone at the same time. I only became completely aware of this when I had to shift, and realized something had to give.Collection: Talking
Ask creative people where they get their ideas, and they will roll their eyes. It's the most common question, but it's also a bad one because the answer is inevitably disappointing. From the inside, creativity seems like an arduous task, often involving plebeian, imperfect choices, driven less by inspiration than by deadline.Collection: Inspiration
I think Marco Rubio could never have recovered from revealing himself to be pathetic.Collection: Thinking
Most men I know adore women, and I am including gay men. I think studies on jury selection show that the biggest critics of women - people less likely to trust their character or judgment - are women.Collection: Character
Shakespeare was such a splendid vulgarian.Collection: Splendid
We separated like oil and water. In the cafeteria, you'd see a table of black jocks, table of white jocks, table of rich white kids, table of Hispanic kids, table of Chinese kids, table of druggies, table of chatterboxes, and so on. Wait! There's a diverse table over there! With a few kids of different tenacities and economic status! Oh, that's the nerds. That's where I sat. We weren't cool enough for the other tables, so we didn't discriminate against anybody.Collection: Kids
Hillary Clinton rubs people the wrong way, for valid reasons.Collection: People
Knowing the identity of the leaker helps you analyze the likelihood that the material is real.Collection: Real
You know, I am not a particular Kennedy apologist or an awed fan - I was 12 when he was murdered - but I have discussed Kennedy with historians. For his incredibly short tenure, he was a very important president. Many put him in the second tier, below the big three and surrounded by Truman and Eisenhower. Kennedy moved our soul. Changed our thinking about service and governance. And won big in the greatest nuclear crisis of the Cold War.Collection: War
Peggy Noonan is not as good a columnist as my colleague Kathleen Parker, in my opinion, but they share something related to their Pulitzers. Kathleen won in in 2010. They won it for a similar reason. They broke from their crowd, and sprinted away. They delivered the politically unexpected take, at some peril to their readership.Collection: Opinion
Life entails risk, and you have to draw some lines.Collection: Risk
Every single fat comic uses his weight as a punchline. There is something sad about that.Collection: Use
I like to eat alone in restaurants, with a book, particularly if I am out of town, alone, on business. It's relaxing. I feel not even a twinge of embarrassment. Is this gender-related? Is there a lingering feeling among women that if they are alone in public, they will be judged to be spinsters or spinsters-to-be?Collection: Book
If I lived where I live right now, and my kids were in middle school, they would be the only white kids in the school. That is not a burden I wanted to place on them. My preference would have been a school that was totally diverse - half and half, or close. I wouldn't have hesitated at all if they would have been in the racial minority. But to be the only white kids: I don't think that would have been fair to them.Collection: School
You should support Israel not because it is Jewish but because it is a sane, secular democracy. You want Lebanon to be at peace. You don't care much about Kuwait.Collection: Support
I think I might prefer women without makeup. Though I don't really know, because I am not good at identifying makeup. I once wrote in the chat, a long time ago, that my wife wore no mascara. She later informed me dryly that she has worn mascara every day that I ever knew her. Or maybe eye liner. I forget. Which is the one you always wear, girls.Collection: Girl
I have some advice: Unless she is pregnant or handicapped, don't give up a seat to a woman unless you KNOW she is well over 60. Trust me on this, even if I am a liberal.Collection: Giving Up
Johnny Hart became much less funny after he found sobriety, and religion, around the same time.Collection: Sobriety
My neighborhood is fairly white, yet the local middle school is all black. It is bad. It is very bad.Collection: School
I personally favor old mechanical watches, but my snobbery does not extend to demanding that all people wear them. My snobbery demands that no one wear a digital.Collection: People
I was possessing heroin in fairly large quantities in New York City during the years of the draconian Rockefeller Drug Laws. Had I been busted, I would have faced mandatory life in prison. I don't think many white kids walked, either. I knew one who got 15 years for pot.Collection: Kids
First, in a love song, or any song for that matter, using a plastic word like "inhibitions" is just completely without feel or texture. It demonstrates a tin ear for communication.Collection: Song
I believe men's faces come in two kinds: Faces that need a blade, and faces that need an electric. I never was happy with an electric. I became pizzaneck.Collection: Believe
Editorials are editorials. They a supposed to have an opinion, even a very strong one.Collection: Strong
I am not saying Rubin Carter was guilty. I am saying he was very likely guilty.Collection: Guilty
I think we are all exhausted by, and sick of, Donald Trump.Collection: Thinking
I don't think the people of Chicago should be robbed of their birthright to be perennial losers.Collection: Thinking