A guide book is addressed to those who plan to follow the traveler, doing what he has done, but more selectively. A travel book, in its purest, is addressed to those who do not plan to follow the traveler at all, but who require the exotic or comic anomalies, wonders and scandals of the literary form romance which their own place or time cannot entirely supply.

Irony is the attendant of hope and the fuel of hope is innocence.

A more or less accurate measure of class in America is TV size: the bigger your TV, the lower your class.

Americans are the only people in the world known to me whose status anxiety prompts them to advertise their college and university affiliations in the rear window of their automobiles.

I find nothing more depressing than optimism.

Those who fought know a secret about themselves, and it is not very nice.

If truth is the main casualty in war, ambiguity is another.