If you do the job badly enough, sometimes you don't get asked to do it again.

Weekends don't count unless you spend them doing something completely pointless.

My guess is that the editor [Cincinnati Post] wanted his own Jeff MacNelly (a Pulitzer winner at 24), and I didn't live up to his expectations. My Cincinnati days were pretty Kafkaesque.

Reading those turgid philosophers here in these remote stone buildings may not get you a job, but if those books have forced you to ask yourself questions about what makes life truthful, purposeful, meaningful, and redeeming, you have the Swiss Army Knife of mental tools, and it's going to come in handy all the time.

If you give a little credit to the concept of the artist, I think you ought to indulge excesses a bit, because that reflects the personality of the writer. Now if a joke is in bad taste or it's not funny, okay, that's awhole different thing, but how you craft a joke is really what the writer's job is, and I don't think that technique should be subject to any editorial constraints.

I must follow the inscrutable exhortations of my soul.

Calvin:"It says here that 'religion is the opiate of the masses.'...what do you suppose that means?" Television: "...it means that Karl Marx hadn't seen anything yet