Lies are just another kind of storytelling, but with the very distinct and enlivening motive of desperation. Since writers are by nature desperate creatures, they usually do a pretty good (or pretty awful, but always interesting) job of lying.

I have an unfortunate compulsion. I really would rather not do it, as it is very nerve-wracking and un-fun. But when it works, there is nothing like it.

The fact is I'm very self-similar.

I still have a fondness for books. Many a time I will be antiquing, and I'll say, 'What's that old-timey curio over there? What is that, a candlestick telephone, one of those old pull-chain toilets? Oh no, it's a book. I used to help make those things! I will buy it and use it to decorate my chain of casual family-dining restaurants.

I naturally own a lot of very old magazines. And I enjoy going to old magazines because the advertisements in those magazines tended to have thousands of words of copy in them.

This is something that the nimblest standup comedians learn, over time, to handle gracefully. They'll go between prepared material, then they'll respond to what's happening in the room and weave it back into the prepared material and so on.

I am a marginally employed person who can escape with my school teacher wife to the waters of Maine for much of the summer.