You may be surprised to discover you're rich, especially if you're broke.
You can learn all about the human condition from covering the crime beat in a big city - you don't need to go to Beirut for that - but a foreign correspondent begins to understand poverty from a different perspective.
It's better to make fun of yourself because you've always got someone around to make fun of, and they can't sue you.
A humorist doesn't really do that much note-taking.
Crazy old people are our entire source of polling information.
As I get older, all sorts of things become less funny. Once one has children, any cruelty involving children becomes far less amusing than when one was at the mercy of one's friends' and relatives' children.
Satire doesn't effect change.
Fiscal conservatism is just an easy way to express something that is a bit more difficult, which is that the size and scope of government, and really the size and scope of politics in our lives, has grown uncomfortable, unwieldy, intrusive and inefficient.
No humorist is under any obligation to provide answers and probably if you were to delve into the literary history of humour it's probably all about not providing answers because the humorist essentially says: this is the way things are.
I like making things. I have a wood shop at home. I am a terrible carpenter but I love doing it.
I write because I like to make things and the only things I am good at making things with are words.
I realised the bohemian life was not for me. I would look around at my friends, living like starving artists, and wonder, 'Where's the art?' They weren't doing anything. And there was so much interesting stuff to do, so much fun to be had... maybe I could even quit renting.
Southern California is a nice place, if you could cut out the show-business cancer. It just keeps spreading.
I'm old enough to remember when the air over American cities was a lot dirtier than it is now.
My wife and I both come from Irish families. There are two kinds of Irish families: the hitting kind and the kidding kind. If you're fortunate - and both of us are - you come from the kidding kind of Irish family.
There isn't much room for an outsider point of view in print any more.
I don't even know which end of a computer one is supposed to gaze into. I've never used a computer.
Nobody likes insurance companies, especially health insurance companies.
The inherent purpose of American government is let people seek their own goals and to encourage them to be responsible on the various adventures they have on their way to those goals, good, bad, and otherwise.
Fortunately, I'm married to someone who's a pretty excellent parent!
The body is forever teaching us lessons. There are all sorts of things that we can't do, shouldn't do, had better not do very often or do for too long as we get older. The body makes its presence known.
I'm a rather decisive type.
Soldiers are not policemen, and it's very unfair, even for those soldiers who have some police training, to burden them with police duties. It's not what they're trained for, or equipped for.
One of the enduring problems with certain societies in the world - and this is certainly true of a lot of places in the Middle East - is that the capacity for self-governance and self-organizing just isn't there. It has to do with history.
Little islands of human happiness, peace, and prosperity are so exceptional at this point in history that I'm not even sure we can draw lessons from them.
You don't despair about something like the Middle East, you just do the best you can.
I read good. I was an English major.
Something is worth what somebody will pay for it. Nothing else, nothing more, nothing less.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan is the archetypal extremely smart person who went into politics anyway instead of doing something worthwhile for his country.
Distracting a politician from governing is like distracting a bear from eating your baby.
The whole idea of our government is this: If enough people get together and act in concert, they can take something and not pay for it.
I think it's always easy to be sympathetic to parts of the government in detail; in their concrete manifestations. Because obviously, we don't have government for no reason.
Even the dumber parts of our government are not run by idiots. These are ordinary people like us, doing a job. By and large, they're trying to do it as well as they can. Or at least as often as people in the private sector try to do as well as they can.
Health care's not about insurance! Health care's about getting treatment.
Governments have monopolies on certain things, like eminent domain and deadly force.
I've got a 1990 Porsche 911. It's just a Carrera, a very simple, straightforward little thing that goes like stink. I love it.
I like to have interesting things to write about. And when one says something is 'interesting,' one almost always means 'bad.'
If we were to inspect ourselves or members of our family and our friends, we would see that we don't really have to go all the way overseas to be mystified - we can be mystified right at home.
I had always thought of Egypt as a rather secular country. And I think it is, but people are quite observant of the strictures of Ramadan.
One nice thing about making jokes is that you don't have to prove them.
One of the few benefits of being a journalist is that you're not in the Army.
Kuwait City is not gorgeous, actually, but it's got a kind of Epcot Center thing going for it. It's not pretty. But it's striking, I'll give it that. It's not as over-the-top as Abu Dhabi or Dubai. But nearly.
Fascism is very much a mob movement.
Most people sort of enjoy going to work because of the socialisation, a chance to flirt with co-workers and so on, but actually hate the job they do.
I believe in God. God created the world.