In America, if your next-door neighbor has a Rolls-Royce, you want one too. But in England, if your neighbor has a Rolls-Royce, you want him to die in a fiery accident. That's a quote from someone else, but there's something about American optimism, that feeling you can do anything if you're at least middle class in America. If I can have a writing career, anyone can. There's nothing special about me.

I find it ridiculous to assign a gender to an inanimate object incapable of disrobing and making an occasional fool of itself.

At first, writing for The New Yorker was very scary to me. I couldn't imagine anything that I would write in that typeface.

Every day we're told that we live in the greatest country on earth. And it's always stated as an undeniable fact: Leos are born between July 23 and August 22, fitted queen-size sheets measure sixty by eighty inches, and America is the greatest country on earth. Having grown up with this in our ears, it's startling to realize that other countries have nationalistic slogans of their own, none of which are 'We're number two!

Lovers of audio books learn to live with compromise.

I started writing when I was twenty, and my first book came out seventeen years later.

Real love amounts to withholding the truth, even when you're offered the perfect opportunity to hurt someone's feelings.