I think one of the basic tasks in life - one of the nice things we can do for each other - is to take things that are horrible and scary and make them acceptable and less frightening and, if possible, funny. It feels great to succeed at that.

My philosophy involves imaging terrible things happening all the time, and getting used to it, so reality isn't so bad. And then you're always happy. You really just have to think yourself through it. That is how I've been able to come to happiness, but it is a subtle difference between scaring yourself all the time with terrible things happening, it's more about actually about making peace with it. That's my advice.

I get mad at people who talk about traumatic job interviews, about going on one and getting rejected. I get rejected all the time and not only do I get rejected, but people have no problem being really specific about why I was rejected.

It's fantastic to believe, because they get so many benefits. I get mad at the atheist community when they put down believers because they put down religion so much. Now I am an atheist, but I don't like to describe myself with that term. I prefer secular humanist. But I do see first hand how beneficial religion is, for example if you are a refugee getting in a boat to take you across the Mediterranean, a belief in God is an advantage. I completely understand that comfort.

If I look over my life, every single step of maturing for me, every single one, has had the exact same common denominator: accepting what was true over what I wished were true.

Because death and illness are the most horrible things in life, of course that's where the most absurdly funny things are going to happen.

I just became a stronger agnostic, and then I started to realize that everyone who was saying they were agnostic really hadn't thought about it that much. Still, I went with agnosticism for a long, long time because I just hated to say I was an atheist -- being an atheist seemed so rigid. But the more I became comfortable with the word, and the more I read, it started to stick.