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?'

The difference between the first time I read something and the tenth time I read something is generally pretty profound. Even if the script is the same, just the way that I read it is different.

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

I started typing diary in, I don't know, 1978 or '79, but then the computer changed that a lot. Because with the computer if you were writing and you realized you had three sentences in a row that started with the word "he," you could fix that right up, whereas on a typewriter you'd think, "Well, I'm not going to change the whole page. It's my diary." So that made a difference.

Up close the city constitutes an oppressive series of staircases, but from a distance it inspires fantasies of wealth and power so profound that even our communists are temporarily rendered speechless.

Kools and Newports were for black people and lower-class whites. Camels were for procrastinators, those who wrote bad poetry, and those who put off writing bad poetry. Merits were for sex addicts, Salems were for alcoholics, and Mores were for people who considered themselves to be outrageous but really weren't.

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