The main questions of everyday life are too enormous to answer in any definitive sense.

Everything was always something but something – and here was the rub – could never be everything.

We had the great good fortune and shortcomings of character that marked every generation that had never seen war.

The internet takes a lot of the anxiety of life away. It's a kind of deity. You're never lonely. You're always distracted. If you spend enough time on it, there's not really that nagging sensation of existential despair; it erases it very effectively. And it's monolithic. And thanks to it, we've got the ways to linger there after death - your blog exists afterwards, your e-mail exists afterwards.

Comedy is like fictional charm. It's the charm of fiction. Or the charisma of fiction. When you meet somebody who's immediately charismatic, you're attracted to that person. And in fiction it's got to come out in either one of two ways: in the prose itself, and you're hooked immediately because you never want to leave such a colorful and penetrating world. Or, it's simply being a funny writer.

Things could be worse and things could be so much better.

I've always thought things were absurd. It would take a lot more effort for me to see things as reasonable.