East Germany was so total in its totalitarianism that everything was banned which wasn't compulsory.

Fashionably amusing table manners are a matter of breaking the right rule at the right time.

There isn't much room for an outsider point of view in print any more.

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

I started reading Hunter S. Thompson when I was in college.

For toddlers I suggest leaving their mittens on year-round, indoors and out. That way they can't get into aspirin bottles, liquor cabinets, or boxes of kitchen matches.

I figured if I could put together being funny about stuff and actual events, maybe I could do something that wasn't being done much. Because the reporters that I met out there were funny, and they had hilarious stories that just didn't fit in the AP/UPI/New York Times foreign-correspondent style. They couldn't use the things they had. But I could.