We're no longer dealing in the world of the real in a truthful way. We're interacting with each other in shiny homepages. I don't think that makes for honest communication.

Humor is a very big part of life, and if you exclude humor from your book, you're not capturing a very important part of human experience.

One thing that I discovered about myself is I really don't like traveling. I feel like it's a terrible personal failing, but I was so satisfied to arrive at the conclusion.

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.

Once I had the voice, I knew I wasn't going to fall off the bicycle. I tap right back into it. It really was like learning how to ride a bike - you never forget, and I was able to carry it along with some ease. I never encountered any stumping problems that left me not knowing what to do, so I was mostly able to hold my ground. Of course, I should mention that it took me a long time to actually acquire the voice; there were a lot of frustrated attempts along the way, revisions to long sections and versions of the book that I abandoned.

Without work, so much of one's identity just evaporates.

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