Don't send funny greeting cards on birthdays or at Christmas. Save them for funerals when their cheery effect is needed.

Any random group of thirty Vietnamese women will contain a dozen who make Julia Roberts look like Lyle Lovett.

Your money does not cause my poverty. Refusal to believe this is at the bottom of most bad economic thinking.

In England, all the English car companies were beginning to circle the drain in a series of well-deserved failures and bankruptcies, earned by making lousy products with very poor production at high prices. So, the government, back in the '70s, nationalized all the British car companies. The result was British Leyland, a name that perhaps doesn't resonate much with you.

If a journalist shows a facility for praise he's liable to be offered a job in public relations or advertising and the next thing you know he's got a big office, a huge salary and is living in a fine home with a lovely wife and swell kids - another career blown to hell.

I covered the Lebanese civil war. I could see a place that had once been prosperous and now was impoverished. I'm not seeing that in America.

Finally, one night we were smoking pot [with Michael O'Donoghue] and talking about the people that are invariably in high school, whether you go to prep school or public school or ghetto school or rich suburban school. And actually, it spun off from a Kurt Vonnegut quote.