Well, I smoked for seventeen years. I started when I was forty and I smoked until I was fifty-seven. I quit because it became too expensive.

Now then, here are a few things I want to tell you that no newspaper would print these days, even though all of them are true:

1. I enjoyed smoking.
2. It did not appreciably ruin my wind. When I was fifty I could run five miles in fifty minutes and smoke along the way. People who have never smoked seem to believe that smoking makes you short of breath, but that ain’t so, at least for the first twenty years you do it. In the fifties, most professional baseball players smoked. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that there were Olympic runners who smoked.
3. When I quit, there were no bad effects. After a few days, you lose the physical capacity to feel withdrawal. You just have a pleasure deficit.
4. Hell yes, I think smoking looks cool. Ever seen Dr. No, the first James Bond movie? Bond is introduced in the act of lighting a cigarette. Very cool. Or check out Robert Mitchum in the movies some time. Cool.,
5. I love the smell of cigarette smoke. I loved it before I started smoking (at age forty, remember) and I still love it now, even though I haven’t smoked in ten years.
6. Since smoking didn’t harm my health when inhaled cigarette smoke directly, I find it difficult to believe that any non-smoker with normal lung health could possibly be harmed by breathing in the diluted smoke that smokers exhale.
7. The modern disgust with smoking has been imposed on weak-minded fools by a powerful elite. I was born in 1952, and my parents, who did not smoke, had ashtrays in their living room for any guests who came over and smoked. None of us ever thought that our house had been rendered less pleasant to live in because someone had smoked within its walls. This nonsense that smoking is disgusting is just neurosis.
8. May I get cancer next Tuesday if any of these points is untrue.