When [George W.] Bush was elected, I think they thought I would have some sort of special "in" with that administration, to provide some sort of inside poop. Which is not something I'd be interested in doing, and anyway, I didn't. I actually knew more people in his dad's administration. So it was obviously winding down at Rolling Stone, and they were having financial troubles, too. They weren't getting the advertising, and the issues were getting thin. They fired Bob Love, who'd been my editor there for a long time.

Fish is the only food that is considered spoiled once it smells like what it is.

Ever read any [Friedrich] Hayek? He's great. The Road To Serfdom is like... I'm not a big political-science reader, but I actually dog-eared my copy. I ended up going back through it and writing a précis, I was so impressed by this book. It's all about what happens when government tries to make everything right.

If you say a modern celebrity is an adulterer, a pervert and a drug addict, all it means is that you've read his autobiography.

Marijuana is self-punishing. It makes you acutely sensitive, and in this world, what worse punishment could there be?

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.

The people I see on bicycles look like organic-gardening zealots who advocate federal regulation of bedtime and want American foreign policy to be dictated by UNICEF. These people should be confined.