I obviously prefer writing novels but I take my journalism very seriously, and I enjoy doing it between novels. It gives me an opportunity to move in the outside world.

Wherever I travel I'm too late. The orgy has moved elsewhere.

Fiorito has all the right stuff. His splendid memoir about his relationship with his dying father belongs on that small shelf with Philip Roth's Patrimony and Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes.

If you're writing a novel, you're in a room for three or four years. There's not much coming in from the outside.

If you don't count some of Jehovah's injunctions, there are no humorists in the Bible.

The process hasn't changed, but the writer has developed. I still get up every morning and go to work.

Mr. Bernard died on a Monday, at the age of seventy-five, his body wasted. He lay in state for two days in the lobby of the Bernard Gursky Tower and, as he failed to rise on the third, he was duly buried.