Growing Up

At the age of five I had become a skeptic and began to sense that any happiness that came my way might be the prelude to some grim cosmic joke.

​So far as I could make out, what writers did couldn't even be classified as work.

He looked upon the time that had been my future in a disturbing way. My future was his past, and being young, he was indifferent to the past.

Life was combat, and victory was not to the lazy, the timid, the slugabed, the drugstore cowboy, the libertine, the mushmouth afraid to tell people exactly what was on his mind whether people liked it or not.

Unaware of history's higher significance, I slumbered through the bliss of infancy, feeling no impulse whatever to make something of myself.

Listen here, Buddy, the dead don't come back. You never have to worry about the dead hurting you. It's the living you've got to worry about in this world. (Lucy Baker, Russell Baker's mother, to Russell).

Children rarely want to know who their parents were before they were parents, and when age finally stirs their curiosity there is no parent left to tell them.