I have no skills. I mean, I can make jokes, I'm pretty good at talking to people on the Judge John Hodgman podcast. I can figure out what makes a pretty good story, and I can make eggs really well.

I used to enjoy the anonymity of being a literary figure and occasionally a public radio figure.

Specificity is the soul of narrative.

The very idea that there is no truth, but only the filter of narrative through which truth is invented is something I learned at the feet of the most leftist professors at Yale and am learning again from Sarah Palin during the Vice Presidential debate, and I find that very disorienting.

Elwyn Brooks White was a very Maine personality which is, "I hate everyone and everyone stay away from me."

There's a tradition in American fiction that is deadly serious and earnest - like the Steinbeckian social novel.

To want to become the President is, I think, such a bizarre ambition that it is automatically deranging.