Once you go outside your natural audience, there are tons of people that don't like you.

China is not a great idea: capitalism and a dictator. It's like the two worst possible things you could imagine together. It's a very bad idea.

There are some short essays that are very grave, and most contemporary novels are lighter than air.

Albert Einstein didn't care where he lived. Albert Einstein was a genius. Albert Einstein wasn't getting lost in the master bedroom, he was lost in thought.

They know you can't get people to stop smoking, so they develop a system of informants. That's the whole idea of second-hand smoke, you know. Make second-hand smoke dangerous and turn everybody against smokers. Then they say you can't even smoke in a bar - a bar! - because bartenders have a right to a smoke-free "workspace." Ah, bartenders, those health nuts.

Science has done absolutely nothing about noise. The worst design flaw in the human body is that you can't close your ears. The reason you can't close your ears is, if a lion was coming, you had to wake up. Today no lions are coming. Beeping trucks are coming. I read the other day that the guy who invented the beep when trucks go backward, he died. I thought: Of course - he dies, I have to listen to it.

Whenever I am doing anything else, which is most of the time, even if it is not something like robbing a bank, I feel felonious. Writing is what I'm supposed to be doing.