I've been to Washington many times over the years for stories, and it always seems remarkably the same. More the same than the rest of the country. It's almost like they dress the same as they did 20 years ago. The same old guys are sitting outside the same dirty, dingy secret offices in the Capitol that you're not allowed to go in.

Nobody in the United States knows what either a "meter" or a "kilogram" is. The whole reason why we fought the Cold War was so we wouldn't have to learn the metric system.

For people who like peace and quiet: a phoneless cord.

I really need to know where I'm going with fiction to write it in a way that at least I'm happy with. And I really think that a lot of fiction books end badly because terrific writers said, "I'll just figure it out" and plunge in, but have created so many problems that they are kind of impossible to solve. I mean, I'm talking really good writers do this and you can tell when they got to the end they either had to do something preposterous or they just don't really resolve things. So for fiction I spend a lot more time outlining and for humor I really don't do much of it.

The Spanish government, having run completely out of money, secretly sold the Pyrenees to China, and is now separated from France only by traffic cones.

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

The best way to understand this whole issue is to look at what the government does: it takes money from some people, keeps a bunch of it, and gives the rest to other people.