Writing this book required an enormous amount of help from friends. To them goes the credit. I'll take the money.

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.

[Kurt] Vonnegut once said, if you ever want to know who somebody is... Like you look at Richard Nixon, or Adolf Hitler, or Ralph Nader, or anybody who seems like a difficult person to understand, and is therefore not part of the pattern of human behavior. Think about who they were in high school, and they will explain themselves to you. So we got a hold of, like, 50 high-school yearbooks, including my mom's from 1925 or something, and we discovered that they're all the same.

It's better to make fun of yourself because you've always got someone around to make fun of, and they can't sue you.

Anything that makes your mother cry is fun

The body is forever teaching us lessons. There are all sorts of things that we can't do, shouldn't do, had better not do very often or do for too long as we get older. The body makes its presence known.

I suspect the soviets never did want to use those bombs. The most Stalinist of Soviet hard-liners - Stalin, for example - must have realized a nuclear war would be a hard thing to clean up after.