I've never been able to get it straight about what these people who are worried about the trade deficit are worried about. When they say that we're buying too much from overseas, that we're sending too many dollars overseas to get all these goods and services they got, they're saying that the American dollar is too strong and that is hurting our economy. And the result of this will be that the American dollar will get too weak, and that will hurt our economy.

How did an allegedly free people spawn a vast, rampant cuttlefish of dominion with its tentacles in every orifice of the body politic?

You can't shame or humiliate modern celebrities. What used to be called shame and humiliation is now called publicity.

Humor is, by its nature, more truthful than factual.

Finally, one night we were smoking pot [with Michael O'Donoghue] and talking about the people that are invariably in high school, whether you go to prep school or public school or ghetto school or rich suburban school. And actually, it spun off from a Kurt Vonnegut quote.

I don't see evidence of America being a poorer country than it was 20 years ago. I've seen impoverished devastation. I've seen places where things had been good and now they were very bad.

You can learn all about the human condition from covering the crime beat in a big city - you don't need to go to Beirut for that - but a foreign correspondent begins to understand poverty from a different perspective.