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.

Every government is a parliament of whores. The trouble is, in a democracy, the whores are us.

I was never in the office [of Rolling Stone]. It was very different from Lampoon, where we spent a lot of time together socially, which is to say "drunk."

Ideology, politics and journalism, which luxuriate in failure, are impotent in the face of hope and joy.

The Lampoon started in 1970, and I began writing freelance for them around the end of 1971, and then all through '72. They hired me in '73, and I left early in '81. I did everything from low puns to being editor-in-chief.

Never strike anyone so old, small or weak that verbal abuse would have sufficed.

Like Rick in Casablanca: "We'll always have Paris." When what we'll always have is, like, Brooklyn and arguments about [Lev] Trotsky.