“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 proper behavior all through the holiday season is to be drunk. This drunkenness culminates on New Year’s Eve, when you get so drunk you kiss the person you’re married to.

Russians not only vehemently despise blacks, they believe Africa begins at the Ukraine border.

The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn. The Republicans are the party that says government doesn’t work and then they get elected and prove it.

If we heard that somebody starved to death in Sweden or Switzerland, we would be shocked.

Computers seem a little too adaptively flexible, like the strange natives, odd societies, and head cases we study in the social sciences. There’s more opposable thumb in the digital world than I care for; it’s awfully close to human.

Explosion of positive rights started in 1932 with the election of Roosevelt.

If you ask the government to solve all of your problems, it’s a bit like asking your wife to cook and clean, to raise the children, to hold down a second job to help with the family finances, to keep her parents happy and well and keep your parents happy and well, and to also – to do the lawn and clean the gutters.

As a former writer for the ‘National Lampoon,’ I’ve probably contributed to the sea of sarcasm in which we live.

Politics are for foreigners with their endless wrongs and paltry rights. Politics are a lousy way to get things done. Politics are, like God’s infinite mercy, a last resort.

The idea of a stag hunt evokes chivalry – knights in jerkins and hose, ladies on sidesaddles with wimples and billowing dresses, a white stag symbolizing something-or-other, and Robin Hood getting in the way. An actual stag hunt is more like a horseback meeting of a county planning commission.

Always read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.

The Afghans themselves say that if you put two Afghans in a room, you get three factions.

Government proposes, bureaucracy disposes. And the bureaucracy must dispose of government proposals by dumping them on us.

Politics is the attempt to achieve power and prestige without merit.

I believe in God. God created the world.

The problem with public school is not overcrowding in the classroom. The problem is not teacher unions. The problem is not underfunding or lack of computer equipment. The problem is your damn kids.

You put deadlines on people you really don’t want, because that’s how you feel about them.

Im so sick of people treating Latinos like some homogenous group that all feel the same way about everything.

Unlike so many Dylan-writer-wannabes and phony ‘encyclopedia’ compilers, Sean Wilentz makes me feel he was in the room when he chronicles events that I participated in.

in Amsterdam and L.A., when your wife is dying and your son abandons you, you don’t feel very good.

I feel a deep obligation to the men and women who have risked life and limb on our behalf.

When you live in New York, one of two things happen – you either become a New Yorker, or you feel more like the place you came from.

And when it’s sold to 50 countries or whatever, for me it’s a great deal. I make movies for an audience so if that audience grows, I feel really honoured and thankful for it.

Having a life in transit, I feel like you are always looking out the back window.