When I'm walking around, I'm usually drinking pop, so I can't have a mask on. That's why I couldn't be a surgeon.

Let's say Donald Trump loses but it's close. That could change the whole way the job of being a politician shifts - that to succeed in politics, you have to be a caricature of what a politician is supposed to be like.

I like storms. I would say I actively like stormy weather. I would not be afraid of them. I think that if I had not pursued journalism, I think storm-chasing would've been a really fun career.

In New York, people are unhappy on purpose, because unhappiness makes them seem more complex; in Washington DC it just sort of works out that way.

A homeless man once told me that dancing to rap music is the cultural equivalent of masturbating, and I'd sort of fell the same way about playing John Madden Football immediately after filing my income tax: It's fun, but - somehow - vaguely pathetic.

Sometimes I think that the amount of time you live on earth is just an inverse reflection of how good you were in a previous existence. For example, infants who die from SIDs were actually great people when they were alive for real, so they get to go to heaven after a mere five weeks in purgatory. Meanwhile anyone Willard Scott ever congratulated for turning one hundred two was obviously a terrible individual who had many many previous sins to pay for and had to spend a century in his or her own unknown purgatory even though the person seemed perfectly wholesome in this particular world.

I cannot imagine the type of sinister fiend who would be against the library. A library essentially says, 'Look, here is some free information that will enrich your life. Read it on your own time. I trust that you will bring it back when you are finished.' It might be the most civilized, forward-thinking institution in America. Perhaps the only one, in fact.