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.

If you're a "good" teacher, somebody who is responsible or careful, teaching takes time. Teaching is performative. Students nowadays evaluate you and there's a lot made in these evaluations about how you perform. Maybe you don't have the greatest delivery in the world. But you know a lot, have a lot to offer. So that's pretty unsettling. We've become so image-based and performance-based as a society. You have to be ready to appear on "Jimmy Kimmel Live!" at any moment.

[Reality] isn't simply the so-called world that you're in. Your reality is a much larger one that takes in all matter of identification and desires and hopes.

Now that I'm an older woman, I'm so much more aware of the changes - almost too aware. I feel sorry for being so dismissive. You have to think about what you're thinking about and realize that you're thinking it.

It's not the writer who determines how good she is anyway. Writers don't determine that. It's readers who determine that.

There may be an art to conversation, and some are better at it than others, but conversation's virtue lies in randomness and possibility: people, without a plan, could speak a spontaneous, unexpected truth, because revelation rules. Telling words recur in this smart, generous conversation between Stephen Andrews and Gregg Bordowitz: patience, responsibility, feminism, ethics, cosmology, AIDS, gift, freedom, mortality.

You know how some people are upwardly mobile? I'm sort of downwardly mobile in the publishing world, because of my sales figures and also because of the kind of books I write. Everything really counts on sales. I started out with a bigger press, my first few books. But I've always done some things with independent and small presses and small magazines and I always will.