I like books on tape, and will listen to just about anything.

The word 'phobic' has its place when properly used, but lately it's been declawed by the pompous insistence that most animosity is based upon fear rather than loathing.

I'm so old that when I started keeping a diary they were in actual books, and I think that's one the reasons that I've never written about sex. Because early on you had to worry that someone was going to find your diary, so it's bad enough to be writing like Joan Didion, but writing like Joan Didion about sex acts you'd performed with somebody you had known for 20 minutes, that's a bit worse. So I would write in my diary, "I met J. and we had sex five times last night." But I would never write about what we did.

When I look at a lot of older stuff that I've written, I think one sign of amateur humor writing is when you see people trying too hard.

I like to reserve the right to write about whatever I like.

There are lots of things that happen to me that I don't write about.

It's funny how certain objects convey a message - my washer and dryer, for example. They can't speak, of course, but whenever I pass them they remind me that I'm doing fairly well. "No more laundromat for you," they hum. My stove, a downer, tells me every day that I can't cook, and before I can defend myself my scale jumps in, shouting from the bathroom, "Well, he must be doing _something - _my numbers is off the charts." The skeleton has a much more limited vocabulary, and says only one thing: "You are going to die."