“A barn with cattle and horses is the place to begin Christmas; after all, that's where the original event happened, and that same smell was the first air that the Christ Child breathed.”

“The sharpest memory of our old-fashioned Christmas eve is my mother's hand making sure I was settled in bed.”

“All families had their special Christmas food. Ours was called Dutch Bread, made from a dough halfway between bread and cake, stuffed with citron and every sort of nut from the farm - hazel, black ...”

“Every Christmas should begin with the sound of bells, and when I was a child mine always did. But they were sleigh bells, not church bells, for we lived in a part of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where there...”

“Wisdom is knowing when you can't be wise.”

“Power is not revealed by striking hard or often, but by striking true.”

“As time and space are bent by gravity, so too is truth bent by power.”

“What a curious power words have.”

“The weight of the world is a trifle, if we all put our two fingers under it and try to lift together.”

“If we stick together as an American people we can bring down the war criminals that are running our country right now.”

“I have probably purchased fifty 'hot tips' in my career, maybe even more. When I put them all together, I know I am a net loser.”

“All words are pegs to hang ideas on.”

“A word is not the same with one writer as it is with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket.”

“No doubt I shall go on writing, stumbling across tundras of unmeaning, planting words like bloody flags in my wake....”