The drama bug strikes hardest with Jews, homosexuals and plump women who wear their hair in bangs. These are people who, for one reason or another, desperately crave attention

Performance is really an important part of how I edit. I sometimes take something out because I realize I put in a joke just to be funny and the audience laughed, but I should be ashamed of myself. I sometimes take out sentences, which are perfectly fine on paper, just because they don't flow when I say them out loud. I always read my work out loud now.

Nobody pours stuffing like you do, my friend.

... [I] recall thinking that the computer would never advance much further than this. Call me naïve, but I seemed to have underestimated the universal desire to sit in a hard plastic chair and stare at a screen until your eyes cross.

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.

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

There is still the outside world to contend with. A world of backfiring cars, and their human equivalents.