Comedians don't laugh. They're too busy analyzing why it's funny or not.

If I were to ask you for example right now to go back with me and define those moments in your life that shaped you as a person and you began to reexamine them, something would happen.

I stopped writing at the age of 18. I had written incessantly before that. I read, of course, because I was in university, but I wasn't going to write. I wasn't going to do any of those dangerous things. I was going to be a stolid, bourgeois lawyer.

I work seven days a week and I work about 12 hours a day, from the beginning of September to about the end of May; the school year. I take two days off, Christmas and New Year's, Thanksgiving sometimes - two and a half. And the result is that I bonded myself to my desk.

Landing the airplane I think is the most difficult thing that I've every learned to do in my life.

The definition of genius, really, should be that that person can do what the rest of us have to learn how to do.

I would say that writing, both the act of writing, and of course reading of other people's work is, for me, supreme joy.