People are less focused on the story, and more on how the story is told.

It's easy, at this point in my life, very easy to write a beautiful sentence that's meaningless. A lot of writers do that. But I don't want it to be meaningless. I want it to actually say what I want it to say, and so I'm thinking about it again and again and again.

As a reader myself, which precedes my being a writer, of course, I read in order to enter another world.

Nonfiction gives you subjects. Writing fiction I can have more fun, but I have to invent my subject.

Jokes are great capsules of information. I think they should never be censored. They often are offensive - and we're offended by different things - but I believe deeply in what Freud wrote of their relationship to the unconscious, which is that jokes come to help us. We laugh so as to dispense with, or to express, some ambivalence or discomfort with the things around us. That's what laughing is: a release.

Writing and rewriting are the same thing to me. I don't believe what Allen Ginsberg said that "first thought, then - " I just don't believe that.

Whatever the style is, I want to have a sense that the writer is thinking, and really trying to get at something, and that there's a sense of discovery as the writing goes along.