A firm, hearty handshake gives a good first impression, and you'll never be forgiven if you don't live up to it.

Cats are to dogs what modern people are to the people we used to have. Cats are slimmer, cleaner, more attractive, disloyal, and lazy. It's easy to understand why the cat has eclipsed the dog as modern America's favorite poet. People like poets to possess the same qualities they do.

I suspect the soviets never did want to use those bombs. The most Stalinist of Soviet hard-liners - Stalin, for example - must have realized a nuclear war would be a hard thing to clean up after.

One of the enduring problems with certain societies in the world - and this is certainly true of a lot of places in the Middle East - is that the capacity for self-governance and self-organizing just isn't there. It has to do with history.

I have three children and three dogs. You put them in a Prius, you know? People who have a Prius obviously have no life! No wife, no kids, no pets - there's no room in there for anything!

Creative writing teachers should be purged until every last instructor who has uttered the words 'Write what you know' is confined to a labor camp. Please, talented scribblers, write what you don't. The blind guy with the funny little harp who composed The Iliad, how much combat do you think he saw?

I was managing editor for a while [in National Lampoon ], and it does cause business problems when your circulation goes up.