It was a given in our family that my father was a grocer so that I wouldn't have to be.

A new regulation for the publishing industry: "The advance for a book must be larger than the check for the lunch at which it was discussed.

Health food makes me sick.

Before I was born [my father] wanted me to go specifically to Yale, which he thought would help. It was easy for him to think I could be president: he didn't have to worry about being president himself, being ineligible because he wasn't born in the United States.

The most remarkable thing about my mother is that for thirty years she served the family nothing but leftovers. The original meal has never been found.

There is no question that Rumanian-Jewish food is heavy. One meal is equal in heaviness, I would guess, to eight or nine years of steady mung-bean eating.

Marriage is part of a sort of 50′s revival package that's back in vogue along with neckties and naked ambition.