ALAN BRIEN

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.

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

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.

Violence is the repartee of the illiterate.

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.

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

Violence is the repartee of the illiterate.

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.

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

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

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.

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.