I am a great admirer of women.

Zero-sum thinking is an obsession of mine, but mostly in economics.

All lies are told with a straight face. It is truth that's said with a dismissive giggle.

Bob Wallace was my editor at Rolling Stone when I first started writing there, and he's a wonderful editor. I was in the Philippines during the Marcos overthrow, and I was up on what was called Smokey Mountain. I think it's gone now, but it was a garbage dump with a bunch of people living on it. I was talking to Bob on the phone, and I told him, "I'm a humorist. I can't write about this." And Bob told me to let my style be dictated by the subject, to take what I saw and write about it in the tone that it requires.

[ I'm] humorist, I guess. Or really more of a reporter. A reporter who reports on funny things.

Maybe a nation that consumes as much booze and dope as we do and has our kind of divorce statistics should pipe down about "character issues."

Not being a liberal, I have very little grasp of things that I know nothing about.