The charm of television entertainment is its ability to bridge the chasm between dinner and bedtime without mental distraction.

Notice, for example, that people who talk about "the joys of childhood" are always adults. Only an adult, utterly remote from the reality of childhood, could suppose it is time of joys."

She is dressed to feel dangerous, perfumed to exude suggestions of nights in Babylon, and painted to drive men insane. How can she possibly avoid facing up to the terrible chasm between dream and reality when, in this musky state of mind, she must sit at a formica bar and squeeze mustard out of a plastic bottle?

Industrial-strength foolishness sets in-in males, at least-at about the age of 18. This is why the military prefers males in the 18-to-25-year-old range when there's combat to be done.

It seems to be a law of American life that whatever enriches us anywhere except in the wallet inevitably becomes uneconomic.

So there he is at last. Man on the moon. The poor magnificent bungler! He can't even get to the office without undergoing the agonies of the damned, but give him a little metal, a few chemicals, some wire and twenty or thirty billion dollars and, vroom! there he is, up on a rock a quarter of a million miles up in the sky.

A man doesn't amount to something because he has been successful at a third-rate career like journalism. It is evidence, that's all: evidence that if he buckled down and worked hard, he might some day do something really worth doing.

After two years studying what rewrite men did with the facts I phoned them, I knew that journalism was essentially a task of stringing together seamlessly an endless series of cliches.

Reporters thrive on the world's misfortune. For this reason they often take an indecent pleasure in events that dismay the rest of humanity.

Inanimate objects are classified scientifically into three major categories-those that don't work, those that break down and those that get lost.