I've always had a way with the little people, making it a point to humor them without looking down my nose at their wasted empty lives.

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

Writing helped to have jobs that involved running around, pushing things like dish carts and wheelbarrows. It would be hard to sit at a desk all day, and then come to sit at another desk. Also, it helps to abandon hope. If I sit at my computer, determined to write a New Yorker story I won't get beyond the first sentence. It's better to put no pressure on it. What would happen if I followed the previous sentence with this one, I'll think. If the eighth draft is torture, the first should be fun. At least if you're writing humor.

It is funny the things that run through your mind when you're sitting in your underpants in front of a pair of strangers.

If finding an apartment is like falling in love, buying one is like proposing on your first date and agreeing not to see each other until the wedding.

Nobody pours stuffing like you do, my friend.

It was the look you get when facing a sudden and insurmountable danger: the errant truck, the shaky ladder, the crazy person who pins you to the linoleum and insists, with increasing urgency, that everything you know and love can be undone by a grape.