Between the time I first started working in advertising in 1998 and now, the word brand has replaced identity. We are no longer individuals so much as we are brands. We're individual brands. Individuals are basically left to define their individuality by staying off the internet, which in and of itself can be a brand, the opting-out brand.

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.

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

We told him to get on with it. We liked wasting time, but almost nothing was more annoying than having our wasted time wasted on something not worth wasting it on.

Some days felt longer than other days. Some days felt like two whole days. Unfortunately those days were never weekend days. Our Saturdays and Sundays passed in half the time of a normal workday. In other words, some weeks it felt like we worked ten straight days and had only one day off.

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

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.