“The label of liberalism is hardly a sentence to public ignominy: otherwise Bruce Springsteen would still be rehabilitating used Cadillacs in Asbury Park and Jane Fonda, for all we know, would be just another overweight housewife.”

America is addicted to wars of distraction.

The ‘working poor,’ as they are approvingly termed, are in fact the major philanthropists of our society.

Lenders, including major credit companies as well as payday lenders, have taken over the traditional role of the street-corner loan shark, charging the poor insanely high rates of interest.

It’s a glorious universe the positive thinkers have come up with, a vast, shimmering aurora borealis in which desires mingle freely with their realizations. … Dreams go out and fulfill themselves; wishes need only to be articulated.

The “discovery” of poverty at the beginning of the 1960s was something like the “discovery” of America almost five hundred years earlier. In the case of each of these exotic terrains, plenty of people were on the site before the discoverers ever arrived.

From the point of view of the pharmaceutical industry, the AIDS problem has already been solved. After all, we already have a drug which can be sold at the incredible price of $8,000 an annual dose, and which has the added virtue of not diminishing the market by actually curing anyone.

My Turn is the distilled bathwater of Mrs. Reagan’s life. It is for the most part sweetish, with a tart edge of rebuke, but disappointingly free of dirt or particulate matter of any kind.

Exercise is the yuppie version of bulimia.

The fact is that heterosexual sex for most people is in no way free of the power relations between men and women.

Both chronic, long-term poverty and downward mobility from the middle class are in the same category of things that America likes not to think about.

That’s the really neat thing about Dan Quayle, as you must have realized from the first moment you looked into those lovely blue eyes: impeachment insurance.

Money does not bring happiness’ – only the wherewithal, perhaps, to endure its absence.

Warriors make wars, but it is also true that, in what has so far been an endless reproductive cycle, war makes warriors.

If God cares about our puny species, then disasters prove that he is not all-powerful; and if he is all-powerful, then clearly he doesn’t give a damn.

In economics, we borrowed from the Bourbons; in foreign policy, we drew on themes fashioned by the nomad warriors of the Eurasian steppes. In spiritual matters, we emulated the braying intolerance of our archenemies, the Shite fundamentalists.

I think it’s tragic that we have this human capacity, which appears to be hardwired, or so the evolutionary biologists say, for collective joy. We have these techniques for generating it that go back thousands of years, and yet we tend not to use this.

I tried to charm the pants off Bob Dylan, but everyone will be disappointed to learn that I was unsuccessful. I got close – a couple of fast feels in the front seat of a Cadillac.

Every soul deserves a shot at a Cadillac, but not everyone should be guaranteed a Cadillac.

I went to jail at 16 for stealing tires off Cadillacs. When I got out I said, Never again.