Now majority rule is a precious, sacred thing worth dying for. But like other precious, sacred things .... it's not only worth dying for; it can make you wish you were dead. Imagine if all life were determined by majority rule. Every meal would be a pizza.

Once we realized that there were these 25 invariable types - the class politician, the frigid popular girl, the kid who tags along behind the jocks - once we came up with these key characters in a cloud of marijuana, the whole thing just came together. One of the things I'm really proud of is how much of a high-school yearbook it is in its look, so much so that Hunter Publishing had the art director, David Kaestle, and I come for years to their annual convention and do a little talk on how not to do a yearbook.

Good manners consist of doing precisely what everyone thinks should be done, especially when no one knows quite what that is.

Keeping house is as unpleasant and filthy as coal mining, and the pay's a lot worse.

The real slums are another matter. The bad parts of Tondo are as bad as any place I've seen, ancient, filthy houses swarmed with the poor and stinking of sewage and trash. But there are worse parts - squatter areas where people live under cardboard, in shipping crates, behind tacked-up newspapers. Dad would march you straight to the basement with a hairbrush in his hand if he caught you keeping your hamster cage like this.

People are always angry at America. They're absolutely certain that America either caused their problems or is deliberately not fixing their problems. But the anger is always directed at America and never at Americans.

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.