My whole creative career is a product of the Internet. ...I'll take that back. To some degree. My fascination with cultural esoterica and trivia and so on was well-formed long before I got my first AOL account.

You are only pretentious if you are not sincere.

It seems that every generation needs its public, tweedy, literary personality to sell its consumer electronics. To whatever degree I can live up to the Plimptonian legacy, I am humble and proud.

When you think about it, the end of the world is a little bit like death: We all know it's going to come eventually, and as we get older, we feel we see the signs more and more distinctly.

Truth may be stranger than fiction, goes the old saw, but it is never as strange as lies.

I've only ever been mistaken for myself. People draw a lot of comparisons to all of the round-faced, mustached men of entertainment that make me cringe and sick to my stomach about how the world really sees me and they're right.

By the time I was writing the second book, my life had changed rather dramatically, thanks to the intervention of television, and I needed to find a way to discuss that. Otherwise the big, fake book would not be true on some level.