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

There are a lot of college writing textbooks that will include essays and short stories, and after reading the story or essay, there will be questions such as "Have YOU Had any experience with a pedophile in YOUR family?" or "When was the last time you saw YOUR mother drunk?" and they're just really good at prompting stories. You answer the question, and sometimes that can spring into a story.

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

In my dream world gay people in America would get the right to marry, and not a one of them would use that right.

Famous people like to choose friends who won't go around repeating their conversations and details about them.

But instead I am applying for a job as an elf. Even worse than applying is the very real possibility that I will not be hired, that I couldn't even find work as an elf. That's when you know you're a failure.

Hugh and I have been together for so long that in order to arouse extraordinary passion, we need to engage in physical combat. Once, he hit me on the back of the head with a broken wineglass, and I fell to the floor pretending to be unconscious. That was romantic, or would have been had he rushed to my side rather than stepping over my body to fetch the dustpan.