“Put him in a raincoat and trademark fedora and have him walk the streets of metro­politan America, and he comes alive on screen. His cockiness and swag­ger make sense on a street”

As Raymond Chandler once wrote, “All us tough guys are hopeless sentimentalists at heart.”

“Nobody who played jazz was considered able to walk in and do a studio call. They were convinced you couldn't read, or you wouldn't show up, or you'd fall down drunk”

“Many jazz musicians don’t like singers, and some will go to great lengths to avoid play­ing for them. Not without rea­son. Frank Sinatra is a rare excep­tion.”

“Sinatra remained white America’s last completely satisfying definition of masculine style — to somewhat disconcerting effect, let me add”

“To judge from what the President said, any hint of lawlessness can be redeemed if undertaken unselfishly for patriotic reasons. It's an argument that would have warmed Nazi hearts at Nuremberg.”

“Like Garbo or Chaplin, he looms over the cultural life of the century, defying analysis, because every generation has to figure him out from scratch.”

“His office’s apparent mishandling of solid BCCI leads is fair crit­icism of him whether he did or did not know about it: he missed a golden opportu­nity to examine the so-called Bank of Crooks and Criminals”

“The release last week of the report of the independent counsel marks a frustrat­ing anticlimax to what clearly is a continuing crisis of American gov­ernment”