But I'm a humorist. I'm not a reporter, I never pretended to be a reporter.

I don't worry about being exposed. When I'm writing about myself I think about myself as a character. There is a ton of stuff going on in my life that I don't write about. If I need to write that stuff down, I write about myself in my diary.

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

What other people call dark and despairing, I call funny.

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

I think if you write humor, then people don't - you know - they don't give you that much credit. They tend to think you just dictate your stories into a tape recorder. And I'm not necessarily insulted by that, because I think that just means that it looks easy.

I've always had a way with the little people, making it a point to humor them without looking down my nose at their wasted empty lives.