There are a lot of mysterious things about boats, such as why anyone would get on one voluntarily.

Commies love concrete.

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.

We're told cars are wasteful. Wasteful of what? Oil did a lot of good sitting in the ground for millions of years. We're told cars should be replaced with mass transportation. But it's hard to reach the drive-through window at McDonald's from a speeding train. And we're told cars cause pollution. A hundred years ago city streets were ankle deep in horse excrement. What kind of pollution do you want? Would you rather die of cancer at eighty or typhoid fever at nine?

I had grown up as a feature writer, and basically my career had been in The National Lampoon and as a magazine editor, and I'd never been a reporter.

Health care is too expensive, so the Clinton administration is putting a high-powered coporate lawyer - Hillary - in charge of making it cheaper. (This is what I always do when I want to spend less money - hire a lawyer from Yale.) If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it's free.

Just as some things are too strange for fiction, others are too true for journalism.