On Complaining: I wrote a piece in the NEW YORKER once about the renovation of our subway stop, the subway station on Sheridan Square, and I said it's given us a new problem, they renovated in a beautiful way and we can't find anything to complain about. My theory was that in the same way people used to say that Eskimos had 58 words for snow, New Yorkers have maybe 60 or 70 words for complaint and two phrases for approval -- "not so bad" and "it could be worse." On Attitude: If you actually tried to use signs to get to La Guardia airport you'd end up in Scarsdale or something. Occasionally you're driving along, say, in Washington Heights or something, and there's a little black sign with an arrow that says, Javits Convention Center, and that's the last one you're gonna see. It could very easily just say, Yellow Springs, Ohio . . . I think it's because true New Yorkers like to think that they're the only ones who can find their way around, and I think that's why the subways are very hard to figure out. It was only about, I would say 10 or 15 years ago that the maps of the New York subway system started appearing outside the cars. It used to be, you had to get on the car, and the doors closed and you went hurtling off in the wrong direction and then if you happened to be a graduate of the Royal Institute of Cartography and could figure out this map, you could figure out which way you were going, but you were already inside the car . . . People will tell you that it has to do with the merging of these different lines and everything, but I don't think so. I think it's what New Yorkers use to protect the information from people like me, because I think of myself as sort of a resident out-of-towner. On Mayors: I think everybody's favorite politician was La Guardia, I mean I suspect that there's some historian somewhere who can tell me that actually everything I think about La Guardia is a misapprehension based on the idea that he read the funnies on the radio to people during the newspaper strike, but . . . I think that one of the things about him was, he was combative, and I think being combative is sort of part of the New York style, that I think people in New York appreciate. In general, I think people appreciate mayors who are sort of characters. I suspect in modern times people realize that there's no way to govern the cities anyway, so you might as well have somebody entertaining.		Photo: Courtesy of Trillin Family The author of 19 books -- ranging from serious journalism to comic novels -- Trillin has been a staff writer for the NEW YORKER for 35 years. He also writes a column for TIME and a weekly poem for THE NATION. His latest book is FAMILY MAN (1998, Farrar, Straus & Giroux), and his memoir REMEMBERING DENNY (1993, Farrar, Straus & Giroux) was a bestseller. He has also published THE TUMMY TRILOGY (1994, Farrar, Straus & Giroux), three books on eating in America. Born and raised in Kansas City, Missouri, Trillin graduated from Yale University and worked for TIME from 1960-63