I understand the relationships between the crew chiefs and the engineering or between fabrication and the body shop.

I am just so proud to be able to take my NAPA car, my NAPA Toyota, to the West Coast and race in front of the fans in Southern California.

I don't understand why everybody can't remember how exciting the Daytona 500 has been over the years when Richard Petty and David Pearson and Darrell Waltrip ran just the three of them racing for the win. Why do you have to have 40 cars in a pack to say it's exciting?

When you're not successful, people look at the driver and say, 'what's wrong with him?' and sometimes the drivers look back and wonder 'what makes you think you're not the problem?'

I always thought if you run a Marathon in less than 4 hours, there is a tick of athletic accomplishment in that. Anything over that is just an old guy with a hard head who isn't going to stop until he's done.

I like Miami.

My life is consumed by racing.

The Daytona 500 is what it is because of the tradition and history of this great event. People have been coming out in February since 1950 to watch this great race. It would be hard to ever change that.

I'm used to being judged. I know what that feels like.

You have to think that if you're starting first instead of 31st you've got a better chance to win.

You can always figure if it's a Busch race then I'm going to be at the front.

As a driver, you always want to win every race, but as a car owner you know that isn't very realistic.

Charlotte is a place I always enjoy racing.

If you look at my career statistics, it's not pretty.

When 'Michael Waltrip Racing' and 'competitive juices' are discussed, naturally the subject of jet fuel arises. I'm here to tell you that I can be competitive without jet fuel; that stuff tastes awful.

I won the Daytona 500. I won these races twice. I knew I didn't need anything cheating on my part.

You don't win NASCAR races without ability.

When there are challenges like there were up to and after Daytona in 2001, you remind yourself it will one day make sense why everything happens the way it does. You may not figure it out now on this earth, but in heaven, it will all make sense.

There's been bumps in the road and serious challenges along the way, but my love for NASCAR and my zest for life is what's most important to me.

NAPA has been with me from winning two Daytona 500s, to missing races with a new start-up team, and back to victory lane again. The relationship grew far past that of just a sponsor, but more of a partner and a friend.

Edward Snowden copied and leaked information from inside the world's most protected spy agency, and then fled to Russia, but yet, because a small part of the data he expropriated was provided to a news organisation, journalism conventions readily accord him lone whistleblower status.

Rusbridger had risen at the Guardian through the years when it not only had the support and fail-safe mechanism of the Scott Trust, but guaranteed operating income from public-service advertising. Nobody had to sell anything.

In America, the new post-postmodern politician is all about authenticity: the daffier you are, the 'realer' you must be. The more you have committed yourself to a ridiculous idea and fevered view, the more worthy you are of attention.

Trump's election was dispiriting and confounding to most traditional political players - perhaps nobody more so than Murdoch. Still, Murdoch did what he has always done: made sure he had maximum influence with the new president.

Journalism has become a form of idealism. It is no longer, first and foremost, function, craft, service - it is mission.

Cable television is basically now the business of former political professionals. Joe Scarborough, a former Florida Congressman, is a far more successful cable host than he ever was a politician.

Possibly the defining development of postmodern politics - naturally, an American one - is the separation of personality from ideology. If you are likeable, or at least not disagreeable, if you can strike a personal bond with the electorate, if you reassure rather than disrupt, it doesn't really matter what you stand for.

I can hardly tell you how boring it is to interview almost every politician among the multitudes I have ever interviewed (journalists can't say this, because if people knew how boring politicians were they wouldn't read what we write), how dead the conversation feels, how bald, flat, uninteresting the message is.

Reality television is to television what marble and gold are to real estate. The point is to dispense with the idea of taste. It's all id. The more unrestrained the better. We all know that 'reality' in reality television is not real. That anybody who would participate in reality television is a fake. But pretending otherwise makes them real.

For decades, Trump had no life independent from the media. He became a figure in the nation, and his a monitisable name - albeit quite a ludicrous one - because of his nonstop, relentless, shameless and often embarrassing courtship of the media.

I am old enough to think the word 'journalist' is not all that noble a designation. Journalist - that record keeper, quote taker and processor of press releases - was, in the world of letters I grew up in, a lower-down job. To be a writer - once the ambition of every journalist - was to be the greater truth teller.

There was, when I came to New York in the 1970s, no more profound or moving experience than MoMA, an almost perfect piece of 20th Century modernist expression, existing in an extraordinary balance - modestly, functionally, elegantly - with the extraordinary art it held. This place changed my life. I was transformed by every visit.

I have written periodically for the Guardian for more than a decade.

One of the secrets of Fox News' outsized success - it's the most profitable news organisation in the U.S. and, quite likely, the world - is that it saw the country full of liberal occupiers and Fox News' viewers as the heroic resistance.

I am in the representational business, a portraitist. I have tried to walk an amused line amid hyperbole, documentary detail, cruel characterisation, occasional affection, some good punchlines and anthropological social insight. It's been a good living.

I have known Boris Johnson since 2004. I wrote the first big profile about him in the American press. I've been edited by him when he ran the Spectator. I know his family.

One point about understanding Donald Trump is that he is always representing something which has only a casual connection to what he actually is.

In a career of trying to pry secrets, gossip, specificity and truth out of media executives, Ailes has been the most forthcoming, personal, compelling and honest I've ever dealt with.

Galling for left-wing activists and the mainstream media's bottom line - in its way as galling as Fox's daily agitprop - was the fact that liberal media did not have the talent or the savvy or the passion to match conservative media's success.

Curiously, many Democrats have acceded to Clintonism not because of their cold practicality and political professionalism, but because the Clintons are the sworn enemy of the right. The Clintons, in other words, while hardly being left, have been defined as the opposite of being right - the enemy of my enemy being my friend.

Unlike financial impropriety, which needs to be proven, a charge of sexual loutishness and aggressiveness in and of itself can finish you off. Does the man match the charge? To be the kind of man who would be accused of being so gross is guilt enough.

The Steve Bannon I know - I locate Steve's politics as a Democrat circa 1962.

The most characteristic aspects of the Clintons, a political couple who might otherwise largely see themselves as practical-minded centrist consensus builders, is, of course, how much personal hatred they inspire.

How advertising is handled has always been a key distinction between low and high order publishing. The higher you stood, the more separate you were from advertising, and, in the logic of snobbery, the greater a premium price the top brands would pay to be in your company.

I mean, can Donald Trump get elected again in 2020 without Steve Bannon? I would say no.

The emerging notion of the Eighties was that publicity was a currency. The old view was that if you had a currency - your talent or your product - publicity might draw attention to it. The new view was that publicity in itself, highlighting you, bestowed value.

Fame, in Trumpian fashion, is war. You are expected to defend your fame; many people want to take it from you.

The rise of Donald Trump established a new ground zero for liberal media, requiring no pretence of balance - better yet, with a kind of political brain haemorrhage, everybody seemed to have lost the ability to be balanced.

Every journalism bromide - speaking truth to power, comforting the afflicted, afflicting the powerful - that otherwise would be hopelessly sappy to a journalist of any experience, has become a Twitter grail. The true business of journalism has become obscured because there is really no longer a journalism business.

Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and George W Bush (and, in their image, Tony Blair) bitterly annoyed their antagonists because they were - at least until the Iraq war caught up with Blair and Bush - Teflon. David Cameron is in this model.