There was an austerely dignified award ceremony. By that I mean we had to buy our own drinks - in clear violation of the international journalists'code of truth, fairness and an open bar.

People are all exactly alike. There's no such thing as a race and barely such a thing as an ethnic group. If we were dogs, we'd be the same breed. George Bush and an Australian Aborigine have fewer differences than a Lhasa apso and a toy fox terrier. A Japanese raised in Riyadh would be an Arab. A Zulu raised in New Rochelle would be an orthodontist. People are all the same, though their circumstances differ terribly.

One of the problems with being a writer is that all of your idiocies are still in print somewhere. I strongly support paper recycling.

The Vietnamese Hoa were merchants and manufacturers. They were very successful and thus, according to the logic of Marxism, responsible for society's failures. The Hoa suffered the same fate as the pizza parlour in Spike Lee's Do The Right Thing except at the hands of the world's fourth largest army instead of a small, petulant movie director.

Most of the people who have grabbed hold of climate change and greenhouse gases, pollution, oil dependency - they have another motive, and their motive is to attain the appearance of virtue without having actually done anything virtuous.

If the dollar weakens, then presumably all the things that we make in the United States - Buicks, for instance - can be sold cheap all over the world, and everyone will be buying our goods, and we'll get all sorts of yen-denominated, or yuan-denominated, or euro-denominated securities, and then everybody else will be worried.

If you get outside the world of show business and its satellites, there's a whole world of car nuts in the Los Angeles area.