“Richard Nixon was the best thing that ever happened to journalism. I mean this guy was wonderful. Just when you thought he could get no worse, he got worse.”

Maybe climate change is a threat, and maybe climate change has been tarted up by climatologists trolling for research grant cash. It doesn’t matter.

Feeling good about government is like looking on the bright side of any catastrophe. When you quit looking on the bright side, the catastrophe is still there.

The importance of local governance may not be obvious to an America accustomed to treating city and state downfalls with doses of federal comeuppance. Sometimes there’s a reason for that – the Civil War. More often, all reasoning seems absent – No Child Left Behind.

I like to think of my behavior in the sixties as a ‘learning experience.’ Then again, I like to think of anything stupid I’ve done as a ‘learning experience.’ It makes me feel less stupid.

The world is being run by irresponsible spoiled brats.

New Hampshire polling data are unreliable because, when you call the Granite State’s registered Republicans and independents in the middle of dinner and ask them who they’re going to vote for, they have a mouth full of mashed potatoes and you can’t understand what they say.

The 20th century was a test bed for big ideas – fascism, communism, the atomic bomb.

Call a man ‘ignorant,’ and you have license to show the world your vast fund of knowledge and wise him up.

There isn’t much room for an outsider point of view in print any more.

The C student starts a restaurant. The A student writes restaurant reviews.

A U.S. dollar is an IOU from the Federal Reserve Bank. It’s a promissory note that doesn’t actually promise anything. It’s not backed by gold or silver.

I’m old enough to remember when the air over American cities was a lot dirtier than it is now.

When you’re a war correspondent, the reader is for you because the reader is saying, ‘Gee, I wouldn’t want to be doing that.’ They’re on your side.

When I’m in the car, I want the only one shouting to be me.

If you spend 72 hours in a place you’ve never been, talking to people whose language you don’t speak about social, political, and economic complexities you don’t understand, and you come back as the world’s biggest know-it-all, you’re a reporter. Either that or you’re President Obama.

I rarely meet a politician that I don’t like personally. They are generally well endowed with charm. Therein lies the danger.

It is best for ordinary men to have only one wife !

Negotiation talks are the best way to solve anything. We must replace wars and weapons with negotiations and talks.

You can dominate a game if you dominate on the line… We’re just going to have to go out there and work hard and blow people off the ball, and let our runners do what they do best.

The best advice anybody could have given me was to keep getting up over and over again.

I’m just going to be the best version of me that I could possibly be and be as funny as I possibly can.

It seems the best work I do is when I am really allowing the unconscious to rule the page and then later I can go back and hack around and make sense of things.

Children make up the best songs, anyway. Better than grown-ups. Kids are always working on songs and throwing them away, like little origami things or paper airplanes. They don’t care if they lose it; they’ll just make another one.

Problems are chances for us to do our best.