I wake up every day in order to do something that's quixotic, and not necessarily called for in the world, but I do it because there's extraordinary meaning for me behind the effort.

After I left college I thought, very naively, that either you became someone interesting - an artist - or you went into academia. If you ended up in an office you were dull and lacking. And I ended up in an office.

I think a fairly common behavior among fiction writers is that they want to help. They're generally charitable people. They're interested in the world. They're curious, they're empathetic. They understand suffering. They don't turn away from that. But what they do is essentially useless. Except for the sake of the thing itself.

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.

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.

The office is a romantic enabler because you're always around the person you have a crush on. There's no escape from, and maybe no desire to escape from, those pressure-cooker conditions. And there's an automatic series of things you have to talk about all the time.

That's one of the things about comedy - I think it works best when it's contextualized, as opposed to kind of an island of cleverness.