I spent months searching for some secret code before I realized that common sense has nothing to do with it. Hysteria, psychosis, torture, depression: I was told that if something is unpleasant it's probably feminine. This encouraged me, but the theory was blown by such masculine nouns as murder, toothache, and rollerblade. I have no problem learning the words themselves, it's the sexes that trip me up and refuse to stick.

I've wasted a lot of time pretending to be interested in people who weren't terribly interesting.

Most people, or at least most of the people that I've come into contact with, would like to be written about.

When forced to leave my house for an extended period of time, I take my typewriter with me, and together we endure the wretchedness of passing through the X-ray scanner. The laptops roll merrily down the belt, while I’m instructed to stand aside and open my bag. To me it seems like a normal enough thing to be carrying, but the typewriter’s declining popularity arouses suspicion and I wind up eliciting the sort of reaction one might expect when traveling with a cannon. It’s a typewriter,’ I say. ‘You use it to write angry letters to airport security.

I wish that I had re-edited 'Theft By Finding' after I did the audio. Because the audio took 40 hours in the studio, and I was standing on my feet. So toward the end of it I'd be looking at certain diary entries and I would think, "Is this really worth my time to read this out loud?" And I would think, "No, it is not." I would have cut out 75 pages, just because I was tired of standing up.

I felt uncomfortable calling myself a writer until I started with 'The New Yorker,' and then I was like, 'Okay, now you can call yourself that.

I went from having 50 listeners to 50 million listeners.