“I can win an argument on any topic, against any opponent. People know this, and steer clear of me at parties. Often, as a sign of their great respect, they don't even invite me.”

“Hobbies of any kind are boring except to people who have the same hobby. This is also true of religion, although you will not find me saying so in print.”

“We journalists make it a point to know very little about an extremely wide variety of topics; this is how we stay objective.”

“If you look at any list of great modern writers such as Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, you’ll notice two things about them: 1. They all had editors. 2. They are all dead. Thus we can draw the scientific conclusion that editors are fatal.”

“You can say any fool thing to a dog and the dog will just give you this look that says, 'My GOSH, you're RIGHT! I NEVER would've thought of that!”

“Which, as any American high school student can tell you, was an act that apparently had something to do with stamps.”

“I like the relaxed way in which the Japanese approach religion. I think of myself as basically a moral person, but I'm definitely not religious, and I'm very tired of the preachiness and obsession with other people's behavior characteristic of many religious people in the United States. As far as I could tell, there's nothing preachy about Buddhism. I was in a lot of temples, and I still don't know what Buddhists believe, except that at one point Kunio said 'If you do bad things, you will be reborn as an ox.'This makes as much sense to me as anything I ever heard from, for example, the Reverend Pat Robertson.”