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.

I am working on a book urging the beating to death of baby whales using the dead bodies of baby seals.

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.

Chickenshit can be recognized instantly because it never has anything to do with winning the war.

Tourism requires that you see conventional things, and that you see them in a conventional way.

Understanding the past requires pretending that you don't know the present. It requires feeling its own pressure on your pulses without any ex post facto illumination.

Anybody who notices unpleasant facts in the have-a-nice-day world we live in is going to be designated a curmudgeon.