P.J. O'Rourke Quotes

If you say a modern celebrity is an adulterer, a pervert and a drug addict, all it means is that you've read his autobiography.

There's something about Marxism that brings out warts; the only kind of growth this economic system encourages.

The typical old-fashioned diet (in the nineteenth century) was so bad it almost assembled modern dieting.

Southern California is a nice place, if you could cut out the show-business cancer. It just keeps spreading.

Crazy old people are our entire source of polling information.

Evan Rachel Wood is the best actress I've ever worked with, hands down.

I've been a New Yorker for ten years, and the only people who are nice to us turn out to be Moonies.

When my mother was sick, I found myself needing to put down in my journals all sorts of things - to try to understand them, and, I think, to try to remember them.

My Panasonic typewriter can make graphs. It types in four different colors.

My parents put everything in a trust fund for me. I won't get it until I'm 18, so I'll use it for college.

One of the things about grief is that it can bring a deeper perspective into your life; in the end, it has, for me, though it's also brought sorrow.

I read mysteries like Nancy Drew and Alfred Hitchcock, and I swim and I ride my motorbike.

In Washington journalists can afford to live almost as well as people who work for a living.

It's a blessing not to be alone in your grief but it's also painful to see your parents and siblings in pain.

I was very immature when I was young, and for me there was no balance. Everything was just all or nothing.

East Germany was so total in its totalitarianism that everything was banned which wasn't compulsory.

Germans respond well to lies. At least, they always have historically.

One of the ideas I've clung to most of my life is that if I just try hard enough it will work out.

Grief is characterized much more by waves of feeling that lessen and reoccur, it's less like stages and more like different states of feeling.

I believe in the importance of individuality, but in the midst of grief I also find myself wanting connection - wanting to be reminded that the sadness I feel is not just mine but ours.

Where I come from, being a hard man is being able to take a good beating and then get back up again and carry on fighting.

Journalists aren't supposed to praise things. It's a violation of work rules almost as serious as buying drinks with our own money or absolving the CIA of something.

Usually if you read a screenplay, no matter who's writing it, the bad guy is always written as a one-dimensional bad guy.

I always knew I'd accomplish something very special - like robbing a bank perhaps.

Australia is not very exclusive. On the visa application they still ask if you've been convicted of a felony - although they are willing to give you a visa even if you haven't been.

I can think of a number of areas in New York where three acres of nuclear waste would make the neighborhood safer to walk around in than it is now, and better lit.

A lot of the stuff I am now seeing is edgy, raw kinda material.

The young are adept at learning, but even more adept at avoiding it.

Cockfighting has always been my idea of a great sport -- two armed entrées battling to see who'll be dinner.

B students work for C students - A students teach.

Politics is the art of achieving prestige and power without merit.

I pretend something scary is in front of me.

Smoking crack is a way for people who couldn't afford college to study the works of Charles Darwin.

Violence is interesting. This is a great obstacle to world peace and also to more thoughtful television programming.

If I give up drinking, smoking, and fatty foods, I can add ten years to my life. Trouble is, I'll add it to the wrong end.

There's no such thing as a trade deficit.

All lies are told with a straight face. It is truth that's said with a dismissive giggle.

I find it hard to see how my northern cousins could get so worked up about counties created by British imperialists.

The America's Cup is like driving your Lamborgini to the Gran Prix track to watch the charter buses race.

Think about last time you were broke ... now how well did it go with spending your way out of it? Did that work?

There is scarcely an aspect of the American character to which humor is not related, few which in some sense it has not governed. ... It is a lawless element, full of surprises.

People shouldn't be treated like objects. They aren't that valuable.

I still work out most days. When I do it, I go full blast five or six days a week, two to three hours a day. I enjoy it. It's therapeutic for me.

The Australian language is easier to learn than boat talk. It has a vocabulary of about six words.

Anyone who thinks he has a better idea of what's good for people than people do is a swine.

One thing talk can't accomplish is communication. This is because everybody's talking too much to pay attention to what anyone is saying

How did an allegedly free people spawn a vast, rampant cuttlefish of dominion with its tentacles in every orifice of the body politic?

Sometimes you need a B-2 bomber and sometimes you need your mother.

Wrestlers are all pretty busted-up by the ends of their careers.

I went back to bumming around New York, writing freelance stuff for Car & Driver and such.