P.J. O'Rourke's Ride on the Wild Side

Michael Buckner / Getty Images The bestselling humorist talks to Marty Beckerman about his new car anthology, Driving Like Crazy—plus how the GM takeover is like an addiction, and why he didn’t get killed as a globetrotting reporter..

P.J. O’Rourke is a relentless quote machine. The bestselling humorist and foreign correspondent, who inherited the Rolling Stone national affairs desk from Hunter Thompson in the 1980s, has cultivated an image as a bitter old man, but remains the only conservative whom left wingers admit is hysterical (in a good way). His new anthology of automotive journalism, Driving Like Crazy, is released this week.

Are we ready to start, or do you need to finish another interview first?

I was just finishing with Nancy Grace. Or was it Bill O’Reilly? They look so much alike, impossible to tell…

Hunter Thompson “was blogging before computers were invented. You should see some of his correspondence—he was Twittering with a postage stamp!”.

The book tour doesn’t sound quite as bad as a dozen years in a North Korean gulag.

No, I’m too old for that; I’ll leave it to the kids. I was a foreign correspondent for 20 years, but I’ve given up traveling to shitholes… I am in Washington, D.C. right now, come to think of it.

Driving Like Crazy. By P. J. O'Rourke. 288 Pages. Atlantic Monthly Press. $24. Do you ever marvel that you didn’t get killed during your Holidays in Hell days?

The great thing about being a print journalist is that you are permitted to duck. Cameramen get killed while the writers are flat on the floor. A war correspondent for the BBC dedicated his memoir to 50 fallen colleagues, and I guarantee you they were all taking pictures. I am only alive because I am such a chicken.

What does globetrotting teach a reporter that D.C. and Manhattan cannot?

Wear long sleeves because malaria medicine makes you crazy. Seasick medicine makes you crazy, too, especially if you mix it with alcohol.

You can learn all about the human condition from covering the crime beat in a big city—you don’t need to go to Beirut for that—but a foreign correspondent begins to understand poverty from a different perspective. In wealthy countries, poverty happens because individuals were not raised the proper way or in the right conditions. In very poor countries, poverty results from a collective lack of money. I think the old-time reporters understood this, back when reporting was a blue-collar trade, because in those days American poverty was a lack of money.