From National Lampoon, you go directly to Saturday Night Live, because it's a lot of the same people.

You start out with Mad magazine, and you go right through the sort of black humor of Lenny Bruce, Lord Buckley, Mort Sahl, Paul Krassner... If you put Lenny together with Mad magazine and run it through the brain of a college student, you get National Lampoon.

Automobiles are free of egotism, passion, prejudice and stupid ideas about where to have dinner. They are, literally, selfless. A world designed for automobiles instead of people would have wider streets, larger dining rooms, fewer stairs to climb and no smelly, dangerous subway stations.

People think the free market is a philosophy, they think that it is a creed. It is none of those things. Free market is a bathroom scale, it is a measuring tape, it's simply a measurement.

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.

The young are adept at learning, but even more adept at avoiding it.

Hunter S. Thompson and I are old friends, but what we do is so different. There are surface similarities that really have to do with us being frustrated poets.