There's tremendous pressure, if you're in that [goverment] system, to be involved and be interested and to care about it. There's no room to say, "This is stupid."

Microsoft has a new version out, Windows XP, which according to everybody is the 'most reliable Windows ever.' To me, this is like saying that asparagus is 'the most articulate vegetable ever.'

If for some reason you are unsure where to go, all you have to do is stand there looking lost, and within seconds a helpful New Yorker will approach to see if you have any "spare" change.

A critical function that we journalists perform at political conventions is to try to get into parties that we have not been invited to. There are dozens of these parties, sponsored by large corporations with a sincere public-spirited desire to become larger.

Sailboats are the slowest form of transportation on Earth with the possible exeption of airline flights that go through O'Hare.

I guess the negative thing that happens to me is that I'm old now. They said there was a generation I was too young for and now some will say there's probably 10 generations I'm too old for. They'll say, isn't he dead or retired or whatever? Or it just becomes fashionable to say "Oh he's not funny anymore," which, I don't know, maybe to them I'm not. I'm more likely to hear that now than I am to hear that I'm unacceptably risqué.

Here in the news media, our focus is on speed. When we get hold of some new and possibly inaccurate information, our highest priority is to get it to you, the public, before our competitors do. If the news media owned airlines, there would be a lot less concern about how many planes crashed, and a lot more concern about whose plane hit the ground first.