Humor comes from the surprise release of some buried tension.

An author's life is different, complex, and ongoing, while a character's remains frozen in one little story.

I always do the wrong. I do the wrong thing so much that the times I actually do the right thing stand out so brightly in my memory that I forget I always do the wrong thing.

We were in dialogue that was about something other than what we were saying.

I always had the sense with her that she didn't suffer fools gladly but that life was taking great pains to show her how.

Basically, I realized I was living in that awful stage of life between twenty-six to and thirty-seven known as stupidity. It's when you don't know anything, not even as much as you did when you were younger, and you don't even have a philosophy about all the things you don't know, the way you did when you were twenty or would again when you were thirty-eight.

Most things good for writing are bad for life.