Marrying for sex is like flying to London for the free peanuts and pretzels. It's not the point of the thing, is it?

When you're in your 20s, your 30s, even, you have - at least, I had - vast ambitions, and you sit around mooning about these things, and you're depressed, because you haven't done them. And it takes you a long time to come to the realization that if you can't be John Updike, well, then, you can't.

Writing is the main gig and teaching and performing are sidelines, an excuse for not writing more. Working on a novel and on an opera make me seriously want to retire and find a volunteer job as a docent at the zoo explaining to schoolchildren where frogs go in the winter.

TV news is as bloody as Shakespeare but without the intelligence and the poetry. If you watch television news you know less about the world than if you drank gin out of a bottle

A married guy is responsible for everything, no matter what. Women, thanks to their having been oppressed all these years, are blameless, free as birds, and all the dirt they do is the result of premenstrual syndrome or postmenstrual stress or menopause or emotional disempowerment by their fathers or low expectations by their teachers or latent unspoken sexual harassment in the workplace, or some other airy excuse. The guy alone is responsible for every day of marriage that is less than marvelous and meaningful.

Roy Blount's stuff makes me laugh so hard, sometimes I have to go sit in a room and shut the door

I'm of an age when if I started to do eulogies, I'd be doing nothing else. You don't want to be remembered? I don't want them to be told to remember me.