Alan Brien quotes:

I have done almost every human activity inside a taxi which does not require main drainage.

The country is laid out in a haphazard, sloppy fashion, offensive to the tidy, organized mind.

The majority of them give the impression of being men who have been drafted into the job during a period of martial law and are only waiting for the end of the emergency to get back to a really congenial occupation such as slum demolition or debt collecting.

Violence is the repartee of the illiterate.

New York waiters, probably the surliest in the Western world . . . are better images of their city than that journalistic favorite the taxi driver.

You can never win as a sight-seer. Somebody else, more often than not the first person you meet when you get back home, has been there before you.

When ordinary Soviet citizens are told that a vital trade agreement awarding their country most-favoured-nation status with the US is being blocked in Congress because Soviet Jews are demanding as an absolute right something few other inhabitants can expect as a special privilege - then the result is likely to be spontaneous outbreaks of anti-Semitism.