With humor, it’s so subjective that trying to think of what the ideal reader would think would drive you crazy.

Once, in Lisbon, I tried my best to work the phone book in a way that would assuage a longing [Alice and I] had for certain Chinese dishes . . . .

I actually think of being funny as an odd turn of mind, like a mild disability, some weird way of looking at the world that you can't get rid of.

In modern America, anyone who attempts to write satirically about the events of the day finds it difficult to concoct a situation so bizarre that it may not actually come to pass while his article is still on the presses.

Irving Wallace family - they have preservatives.

When it comes to rapacious 19th century capitalism, my family's hands are clean.

The shelf life of the average trade book is somewhere between milk and yogurt.