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.

What campaigns are for is weeding out the people who, for one way or another, weren't making it for the long haul.

Getting a tattoo would probably make me cry.

You know, I used to say, when people say, 'How do you think about what to write about in the poems every week?' And I say, 'Well, I have to turn it in on Monday, so on Sunday nights I turn the shower to iambic pentameter and it sort of works out that way.'

Being on a book tour is a lot easier than reporting.

Even today, well-brought-up English girls are taught by their mothers to boil all veggies for at least a month and a half, just in case one of the dinner guests turns up without his teeth.

I never eat in a restaurant that's over a hundred feet off the ground and won't stand still.