People ask me, 'Have you ever considered doing stand-up?' To me it would be less offensive if someone asked me, 'Have you ever considered dental implants?'

Real love amounts to withholding the truth, even when you're offered the perfect opportunity to hurt someone's feelings.

Weird doors open. People fall into things.

My hands tend to be full enough dealing with people who hate me for who I am. Concentrate too hard on the millions of people who hate you for what you are and you're likely to turn into one of those unkempt, sloppy dressers who sag beneath the weight of the two hundred political buttons they wear pinned to their coats and knapsacks.

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.

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

Like anyone nostalgic for a time he didn't live through, I chose to weed out the little inconveniences: polio, say, or the thought of eating stewed squirrel. The world was simply grander back then, somehow more civilized, and nicer to look at.