It's the writer's job to stage confrontations, so the characters will say surprising and revealing things, and educate and entertain us all.

We are what we imagine ourselves to be.

Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.

Nietzsche had a little one-liner on how to choose a wife. He said, ''Are you willing to have a conversation with this woman for the next forty years?'' That's how to pick a wife.

I'm odd, I know,' he said. 'It's fear of myself that's made me odd.

Educate yourself, welcome life's messiness, read Chekhov, avoid becoming an architect at all costs.

A joke is like building a mousetrap from scratch. You have to work pretty hard to make the thing snap when it is supposed to snap.