I thought of myself as kind of an anarchist all my whole adult life, from the days when I was 15 or 16.

It's in great joy that we grasp truth.

So where does the name Adam's apple come from? Most people say that it is from the notion that this bump was caused by the forbidden fruit getting stuck in the throat of Adam in the Garden of Eden. There is a problem with this theory because some Hebrew scholars believe that the forbidden fruit was the pomegranate. The Koran claims that the forbidden fruit was a banana. So take your pick---Adam's apple, Adam's pomegranate, Adam's banana. Eve clearly chewed before swallowing.

When I started, I wanted to be thought of as tortured and seductive, not funny, but humor tends to be a reflexive part of a person's sensibility. It's an almost impossible thing to teach anyone, which leads me to believe that it's intuitive.

I have an enduring, very robust infatuation with dictators. I have an infatuation with Stalin, Mao, and Mussolini. In the Paris Review interview I did (in 2013), I said my next book, this one, was going to be about Mussolini. I wound up only having a Mussolini cameo in the book.

I thought of myself as kind of an anarchist all my whole adult life, from the days when I was 15 or 16.

My work generally tends to be an all-out, 360-degree subversive take on everything, most of all my own notion of myself as a son, father, husband, human being and male in this culture.