Humor is not about problems with airline luggage handlers. It's about our lives in America and it's about the ends of our lives and it's about everything that happens after that and everything that happened before.

When the New Yorker turned down work, they turned it down in such an elaborately gentlemanly way making apologies for their own shortsightedness. Undoubtedly it was their fault but somehow for some reason this fell short of the remarkably high standard that you by your own work have set for yourself. They had a way of rejecting my work that made me feel sorry for them somehow.

Intelligence is like four-wheel drive. It only allows you to get stuck in more remote places.

It was luxuries like air conditioning that brought down the Roman Empire. With air conditioning their windows were shut, they couldn't hear the barbarians coming.

... I never was one to get upset about a few scratches on a motor vehicle, it is meant to be used, not saved.

I grew up in a fundamentalist protestant family that stressed that we were a select people and so we were to avoid contact with others who did not share our faith.

My generation was secretive, brooding, ambitious, show-offy, and this generation is congenial. Totally. I imagine them walking around with GPS chips that notify them when a friend is in the vicinity, and their GPSes guide them to each other in clipped electronic lady voices and they sit down side by side in a coffee shop and text-message each other while checking their e-mail and hopping and skipping around Facebook to see who has posted pictures of their weekend.