Gene Weingarten quotes:

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.

I feel like no matter what happens in my career endeavors after today, going to grad school is one of the best decisions I've ever made.

Sometimes, homely things are done for the best reasons in the world and thus achieve a beauty of their own.

When my daughter was a senior in high school, I remember noticing, almost in passing, that her friends were very cute. Which made me realize her friends' fathers probably found Molly very cute.

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.

For $60, I once bought a neck massage at a 'massage parlor' that advertised in 'The Washington Post.'

The Pulitzer is a crapshoot. Your piece has to hit a few people the right way at the right moment.

Donald Trump is a boor, and cannot stop being a boor.

Donald Trump is an awful loser.

Donald Trump would never belong to a church that required a ten percent hit. He's too smart.

Donald Trump's humor is hostile to a fault.

Hillary Clinton rubs people the wrong way, for valid reasons.

Editorials are editorials. They a supposed to have an opinion, even a very strong one.

When she was too young to resist, or even to understand, I turned my daughter into a lifelong, rabid Yankees fan.

One of my favorite footnotes in the hypochondria book [The Hypochondriac's Guide to Life. And Death.] was about the death of one of the King Charleses. He was essentially bled and vomited to death by his doctors. They also drilled holes in his head.

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 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.

America is an incredibly polarized country politically. I think ANY Republican would start out with 42 percent of the vote.

Being "Jewish" is way stronger culturally than it is religiously.

Donald Trump is showing the intellectual rigor, and emotional maturity, of a second grader. That's hardly being age-ist. This is a man who, when accused by Hillary Clinton of being a Putin puppet, actually responded: "No puppet! No puppet! YOU'RE the puppet."

I don't think there is prejudice against atheists the same way there is prejudice against fat people. I don't think people hate or contemn atheists; I think people feel sorry for atheists.

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.

I believe that sensitivity to issues of race and ethnicity is important, and nuanced, even more so when it intersects with the issue of free speech.

I am the most skilled parallel parker the world has ever known.

What if this world of ours is not based on presumptions of magic? What if this world is really 'What we see is what we get'... Would that be so bad? ... There is a secular magic in everything around us. The world is beautiful. We have love; we should take care of each other. That is not a frightening concept for any parent to deliver to a child.

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.

Ever since roughly 1890, when snot poets first decided that rhyme was confining and unnecessary, every idiot with a pen fancied hisself a poet. The mere act of rhyming was suddenly regarded as a quaint, mannered, and uncool atavism, consigning doggerelists like me to the trash bin of literary history.

An editorial writer might consult a reporter to see what she thinks, if it is what she covers. But they are entirely independent.

Being both stupid and ignorant is an accomplishment.

Every single fat comic uses his weight as a punchline. There is something sad about that.

Hillary Clinton was a cute, smart chick in the 1960s.

I always thought there was some cleverness to the joke diet in which you could eat as much as you want and as often as you want, but everything must be consumed naked in front of a full-length mirror. That would deter me!

I am deebly self-conscious, and bad.

I am not saying Rubin Carter was guilty. I am saying he was very likely guilty.

I believe that the fragile-flower, idea-intolerant society of victimhood that is being cultivated in many colleges today is really bad.

I believe the publisher is a member of the editorial board, and I think his vote would matter.

I disagree with those who suggest that we permanently close down the U.S. mail on the grounds that it can kill you. That is sheer hysteria. I think we should permanently close down the U.S. mail on the grounds that it has been making us sick for quite a while.

I do not believe in public shaming. I do believe that young adults go to college to learn things, and that this process will almost inevitably result in their making mistakes and misjudgments and otherwise acting badly.

I don't consider Hillary Clinton to be the lesser of two evils.

I don't see a point in advertising my marital status when men don't. Completely ridiculous.

I don't think I could ever love someone with whom I fundamentally disagreed, politically.

I don't think the people of Chicago should be robbed of their birthright to be perennial losers.

I have been called the antichrist, though, by Nazis.

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?

I need an irony punctuation mark for the clueless.

I think Donald Trump's going to quickly disappear from radar.

I think Hillary Clinton will make a fine president, and (most important) I am comfortable with her making gigantic, momentous decisions.

I think Marco Rubio could never have recovered from revealing himself to be pathetic.

I think politics is everything.

I think there are a good many Donald Trump voters who are sick of government as it is practiced in America and genuinely want to blow up the system and see what happens. They are stupid - or at least unwise - but not necessarily racist.

I think Trump is simply inept, incapable of rescuing himself.

I think we are all exhausted by, and sick of, Donald Trump.

I think we too often go soft in trying to spare people the agony of confronting reality.

I very much believe in the Intentional Fallacy. If Donald Trump lies and dopes and bumbles and staggers his way into peace in the middle east, he gets credit for it. He owns it.

International politics is not my strong suit. The older I get the less certain I am that I even HAVE a strong suit.

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.

It is hard to quantify the value of name recognition, but Donald Trump has gone from fame to international mega-fame. That has to be gargantuan when your business is your name.

It is not a coincidence that Donald Trump has attracted white supremacists.

It's as though when you order a sirloin steak, it comes with a side of maggots,

Johnny Hart became much less funny after he found sobriety, and religion, around the same time.

Knowing the identity of the leaker helps you analyze the likelihood that the material is real.

Life entails risk, and you have to draw some lines.

Making stuff up is the worst thing a journalist can do. Plagiarizing is the second worst.

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.

Nationalism and patriotism are two sides of the same coin, and the most nationalistic / patriotic country in the last 300 years was Germany during the Third Reich.

One thing I am learning from the kitten is that everything he is doing seems to be in preparation for murder.

Politics is how you think about life itself.

Reporters are not merely recording devices that take down what people say and repeat it in print; we are expected to use our knowledge and experience both for triage - deciding what's important to cover and what isn't - and for contextualizing, analyzing and such.

Rhyme is cool again. It's because of hip-hop. Bless you, hip-hop.

Shakespeare was such a splendid vulgarian.

That is my theory to explain the I don't knows. It's human.

The horrifying thing is that nearly half of America seems in synch with xenophobia and race-baiting.

The Jewish women like Bethany Mandel fare the worst, because they are getting both antisemitic stuff and anti-woman stuff.

The people who are voting for Trump are not voting rationally.

The total wall is between editorial and newsroom. And unbreachable barrier. For good reason. It doesn't mean the two sides don't talk.

The verb "Garland" should be created. It would mean to unfairly put a stinking albatross around someone's neck, to make him unemployable.

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.

Well, let's start with the maxim that the best writing is understated, meaning it's not full of flourishes and semaphores and tap dancing and vocabulary dumps that get in the way of the story you are telling. Once you accept that, what are you left with? You are left with the story you are telling. The story you are telling is only as good as the information in it: things you elicit, or things you observe, that make a narrative come alive; things that support your point not just through assertion, but through example; quotes that don't just convey information, but also personality.

When Trump says fake news, he means journalism that makes points with which he disagrees, usually about him.

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.