He's a boating enthusiast, although that phrase seems too weak to describe the level of his interest, kind of like describing someone as a heroin fancier.

It's very slow for me to create humor. It takes me a long time to write a humor piece. It takes days.

The United States tried, by depressing the clutch of diplomacy and downshifting the gearshift lever of rhetoric, to remain neutral, but it became increasingly obvious that the nation was going to get into a war, especially since it was almost 1812.

I find myself having these conversations where I go...You know, the guy, in that place. The guy in the place with the thing, you know. And it becomes this game of charades. And then finally, we realize that I mean the Pope.

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.

The voice belonged to Mr. Pzyrbovich, an algebra teacher who was always called Mr. P, for obvious reasons. He has a heavy accent, which a lot of kids said made him hard to understand, although to be fair some of these kids would have never understood algebra anyway.

I don't even care what Bill Bryson writes about because he will make it interesting. I love "A Walk in the Woods," about the Appalachian Trail, but his most amazing book is "A Short History of Nearly Everything."