Humor is necessary - it allows the reader to come up for air before dunking them under again. I need humor and I need it on the page to keep the reader going.

Do I exaggerate? Boy, do I, and I'd do it more if I could get away with it.

Kools and Newports were for black people and lower-class whites. Camels were for procrastinators, those who wrote bad poetry, and those who put off writing bad poetry. Merits were for sex addicts, Salems were for alcoholics, and Mores were for people who considered themselves to be outrageous but really weren't.

I've always been very upfront about the way I write, and I've always used the tools humorists use, such as exaggeration.

I hoped our lives would continue this way forever, but inevitably the past came knocking. Not the good kind that was collectible but the bad kind that had arthritis.

I rejected the word humorist for a long time because I thought that it meant you had, like, a cardigan sweater with patches on the elbows, but now I'm old and I do. I grew into that word. I think at heart, all this time, I've been a diarist. I'm not ashamed of it.

Sometimes with 'The New Yorker,' they have grammar rules that just don't feel right in my mouth.