But I read comic books. I read things like Richie Rich and Little Lulu.

My father once nearly came to blows with a female dinner guest about whether a particular patch of embroidery was fuchsia or magenta. But the infinite gradations of color in a fine sunset - from salmon to canary to midnight blue - left him wordless.

She has given me a way out.

It's imprecise and insufficient, defining the homosexual as a person whose gender expression is at odds with his or her sex.

I grew to resent the way my father treated his furniture like children, and his children like furniture.

It certainly was an important moment for me, that realization that I was not going to get what I wanted. It was very freeing. I keep using that word "freeing" or "liberating." I feel like Houdini sometimes, like I'm just getting out of one set of shackles after another, hanging upside down inside a burlap bag with handcuffs on. Hopefully one day, I'm going to get out of this tank of water.

The satiric ethos of Mad was a much bigger childhood influence.