A zoo is a good place to make a spectacle of yourself, as the people around you have creepier, more photogenic things to look at.

Of course, the diary helps me as well. 'That wasn't your position on July 7, 1991,' I'll remind Hugh an hour after we've had a fight. I'd have loved to rebut him sooner, but it takes awhile to look these things up.

It was my friend Frank, a writer in San Francisco, who finally set me straight. When asked about my new look he put down his fork and stared at me for a few moments. "A bow tie announces to the world you can no longer get an erection."

I started writing when I was twenty. My first book came out when I was thirty-five. But I never expected that it would happen quickly.

I can't promise I'll never kill anyone again," he once said, strapping a refrigerator to his back. "It's unrealistic to live your life within such strict parameters

If you are any kind of an artist, then validation . . . can be a result, but you're going to do the work anyway.

I'm completely fascinated by the health-care debate going on in the United States, especially by posters of Obama with a little mustache drawn on his upper lip. Is that what Hitler is really known for, his health-care plan? To quote Bill Maher, "I haven't seen this many pissed-off old white people since they cancelled 'Murder She Wrote.'"