If the wind is blowing like stink and everything is working right, a twelve-meter sailboat can go eleven and a half or twelve miles an hour, the same speed at which a bond lawyer runs around the Cental Park Reservoir.

The Australian language is easier to learn than boat talk. It has a vocabulary of about six words.

The Vietnamese Hoa were merchants and manufacturers. They were very successful and thus, according to the logic of Marxism, responsible for society's failures. The Hoa suffered the same fate as the pizza parlour in Spike Lee's Do The Right Thing except at the hands of the world's fourth largest army instead of a small, petulant movie director.

Moscow has changed. I was here in 1982, during the Brezhnev twilight, and things are better now. For instance, they've got litter. In 1982 there was nothing to litter with.

The dominant type of humor in the '60s was essentially defensive and self-deprecating, using humor as a shield.

It is a popular delusion that the government wastes vast amounts of money through inefficiency and sloth. Enormous effort and elaborate planning are required to waste this much money.

Whenever people tell you they are going to wipe the slate clean, it's your slate they mean to wipe.