[on what he would like to ask former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean:] "The media tries to portray you as an angry candidate. Doesn't that piss you off?" [Adding that the best moment in the 2004 campaign for Democratic presidential nominee was Dean's post-Iowa speech:] "Because clearly everybody was captivated by it. I think that's an argument why he should be President, because he can capture everyone's attention. Listen, George W. Bush was a cheerleader. I'm sure he screamed like that when he was at Yale, and I don't see why that disqualifies someone from being President. But George Bush did it in a human pyramid." [The Union Leader (Manchester NH), January 25, 2004] "We have no desire to make anybody look like a blithering idiot, but we do love it when they do. Because we get it off the A.P. feed, and then we don't have to write anything for the next five minutes. We can just roll the tape." [to Howard Kurtz on "CNN Reliable Sources," January 25, 2004] "Since there's not more news than there used to be, but there's way more time, and more channels doing it all-the-time, so that analysis has become much more than news ... They really have to fill and they go, '(Expletive), we'll just have analysis for the next three hours,' because there's no more new on the story. And then ... the first person with a semi-cogent thought, they go, '(Expletive), I'll say that too.' And then that analysis becomes accepted dogma because analysis is the bulk of what you're getting. You're not really getting any more news." [Deseret Morning News (Salt Lake City), January 23, 2004] [asked why people should watch "The Daily Show":] "You shouldn't listen to us at all if you're looking for information. We don't take ourselves seriously on any level; we're just comedians. ... I'm a huge news junkie. I love what the news does. And we're a shadow, a reflection, of what's happening in the real news." [The Union Leader (Manchester NH, January 25, 2004) It's a sin of omission, is what it is. You're not giving people the whole story about truthiness. It's like Shakespeare still being alive and not asking him what 'Hamlet' is about." - on his mock "crusade" against the Associated Press regarding his claim that coined the word "truthiness" "The fact that they looked it up in a book just shows that they don't get the idea of truthiness at all. You don't look up truthiness in a book, you look it up in your gut." [about the Washington press corps] But, listen, let's review the rules. Here's how it works. The President makes decisions, he's the decider. The Press Secretary announces those decisions, and you people of the press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Put them through a spell check and go home. Get to know your family again. Make love to your wife. Write that novel you got kicking around in your head. You know, the one about the intrepid Washington reporter with the courage to stand up to the administration. You know, fiction. On his creativity: "I wrote things for the school's newspaper, and - like all teenagers - I dabbled in poetry." On writing: "I used to write things for friends. There was this girl I had a crush on, and she had a teacher she didn't like at school. I had a real crush on her, so almost every day I would write her a little short story where she would kill him in a different way."