I write because I like to make things and the only things I am good at making things with are words.
P. J. O'RourkeThe Australian language is easier to learn than boat talk. It has a vocabulary of about six words.
P. J. O'RourkeI like to do my principal research in bars, where people are more likely to tell the truth or, at least, lie less convincingly than they do in briefings and books.
P. J. O'RourkeIt is a law of governance that democracies have to spend themselves dizzy. Citizens of democracies can, after all, tell their government to give them things.
P. J. O'RourkeI'm old enough to remember when the air over American cities was a lot dirtier than it is now.
P. J. O'RourkeSeriously. It was running out at Rolling Stone. First of all, they didn't feel the need for a dissident conservative voice in a world where certain conservative aspects had become intellectually dominant. I would actually argue against that, but on the surface of it, in the [Bill] Clinton years the market economy triumphed, certain libertarian ideas became ordinary, and certain early-20th-century ideas about centralization of government and economic planning and socialism with a small "s" had obviously gone out the window. The Cold War was over, blah blah blah.
P. J. O'Rourke