There are so many different kinds of people in America, with so many different boiling points, that we don't know how to fight with each other. The set piece that shapes and contains quarrels in homogeneous countries does not exist here. The Frenchman is an expert on the precise gradations of espèce de and the Italian knows exactly when to introduce the subject of his other's grave, but no American can be sure how or when another will react, so we zap each other with friendliness to neutralize potentially dangerous situations.

Americans are so emotionally fragile that soon we will have to be carried around in plastic bubbles and fed with an eye-dropper.

Nothing is more likely to start me screaming like a madwoman than New York in February with its piles of blackened snow full of yellow holes drilled by dogs.

Writers who have nothing to say always strain for metaphors to say it in.

Familiarity breeds democracry.

For men who want to flee Family Man America and never come back, there is a guaranteed solution: homosexuality is the new French Foreign Legion.

Any discussion of the problems of being funny in America will not make sense unless we substitute the word wit for humor. Humor inspires sympathetic good-natured laughter and is favored by the healing-power gang. Wit goes for the jugular, not the jocular, and it's the opposite of football; instead of building character, it tears it down.