JIM BISHOP

Archaeology is the peeping Tom of the sciences. It is the sandbox of men who care not where they are going; they merely want to know where everyone else has been.

A newspaper is lumber made malleable. It is ink made into words and pictures. It is conceived, born, grows up and dies of old age in a day.

Nobody understands anyone 18, including those who are 18.

It is difficult to live in the present, ridiculous to live in the future and impossible to live in the past. Nothing is as far away as one minute ago.

The reporter is the daily prisoner of clocked facts. On all working days, he is expected to do his best in one swift swipe at each story.

Gimme: an agreement between two losers who can't putt.

Scoops of mint ice cream with chips of chocolate cows.

Watching your daughter being collected by her date feels like handing over a million dollar Stradivarius to a gorilla.

Books, I found, had the power to make time stand still, retreat or fly into the future.

Golf is played by twenty million mature American men whose wives think they are out having fun.

It is impossible to read for pleasure from something to which you are both father and mother, born in such travail that the writer despises the thing that enslaved him.

The future is an opaque mirror. Anyone who tries to look into it sees nothing but the dim outlines of an old and worried face.

A good writer is not, per se, a good book critic. No more so than a good drunk is automatically a good bartender.

At 19, everything is possible and tomorrow looks friendly.

When you read about a car crash in which two or three youngsters are killed, do you pause to dwell on the amount of love and treasure and patience parents poured into bodies no longer suitable for open caskets?

What makes a good writer of history is a guy who is suspicious. Suspicion marks the real difference between the man who wants to write honest history and the one who'd rather write a good story.

Raising a child is very much like building a skyscraper. If the first few stories are slightly out of line. no one will notice. But when the building is 18 or 20 stories high, everyone will see that it tilts.

Death is as casual and often as unexpected as birth. It is as difficult to define grief as joy. Each is finite. Each will fade.

True love is night jasmine, a diamond in darkness, the heartbeat no cardiologist has ever heard. It is the most common of miracles, fashioned of fleecy clouds - a handful of stars tossed into the night sky.

Perhaps the best thing which can be said about newspapers in the United States is that they are in chronic disagreement with each other. That is what is meant by a free press.

I can look at my books with pleasure from a distance. Four feet is close enough.

Nothing is as far away as one minute ago.

Autumn carries more gold in its pocket than all the other seasons.

A reporter meets interesting people. If he endures, he will get to know princes and presidents, popes and paupers, prostitutes and panderers. And always, in the back of his head, there will be a dozen men and women he will never meet. And always, he will feel the poorer for it.

A good writer of history is a guy who is suspicious.