Folklore used to be passed by word of mouth, from one generation to the next; thats what makes it folklore, as opposed to, say, history, which is written down and stored in an archive.

When carrying a concealed weapon for self-defense is understood NOT as a failure of civil society, to be mourned, but as an act of citizenship, to be vaunted, there is little civilian life left.

Nineteenth-century grass-roots populism made twentieth-century progressivism possible.

The study of history requires investigation, imagination, empathy, and respect. Reverence just doesnt enter into it.

History is a long and endlessly interesting argument, where evidence is everything and storytelling is everything else.

Why do beautiful women love ugly men?

Mainly, the more faddish and newer stages of life are really just marketing schemes. Tweenhood. The young old. The quarter-life crisis.

Germ theory, which secularized infectious disease, had a side effect: it sacralized epidemiology.

Stages of life are artifacts. Adolescence is a useful contrivance, midlife is a moving target, senior citizens are an interest group, and tweenhood is just plain made up.

In kindergarten, you can learn how to be a citizen of the world.

Old reference books are like tree rings. Without them, there'd be no way to know what a tree had lived through.

I invented the historical spy novel.

My motto in life is 'if you give 100 per cent then no one can ask any more'.

PROVIDENTIAL, adj. Unexpectedly and conspicuously beneficial to the person so describing it.

If I didn't have my camera to remind me constantly, I am here to do this, I would eventually have slipped away, I think. I would have forgotten my reason to exist.

Happiness is above all things the calm, glad certainty of innocence.

L.A., its nice, but I think of sunshine and people on rollerblades eating sushi. New York, I think of nighttime, I think of Times Square and Broadway and nightlife and the city that never sleeps.

I want a cheeseburger so badly, but I have to be a vampire in a few weeks.

In me, speaking psychologically, there is always an ongoing struggle between my enormously self-regarding, almost delusionally aspirational, Napoleonic personality and a marginalized one.

It is the docile who achieve the most impossible things in this world.

Today's symphonic music is sponsored by the upper structures of society.