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

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.

Sometimes I think my purpose is as a saboteur when I'm working with other people, derailing what they're trying to do or taking things to a ludicrous extremity.

I was an infinitely hot and dense dot.

“Et Tu, Babe” was born out of my absolute certainty that a writer’s life was solitary and insular, and I was happy with that. I love reading and writing, it’s my whole life.

I dont walk around chuckling all the time. My outlook is very bleak. Its worse than bleak, its apocalyptic.

I've always wanted to be a poet at the beginning. I would look at my grandparents' books and my parents' books. And in my family, a typical aspirational Jewish family, being a writer was very much exalted, and it seemed impossible to me, that I could ever do something like that.