There's a deeper conversation to be had on guns, and just because I happen to know where I fall into that conversation doesn't mean that I don't want to have that conversation.

Hip-hop was a big part of my life growing up, especially West Coast gangster rap. The reason I was able to listen to it so freely was that my mom couldn't hear any of it, so we would be driving along just blaring Too $hort's horrible misogynistic stuff, and my mom would just turn to us and say, "This is great. I can feel the bass. It sounds so nice." And we're like, "Yeah, mom. We can feel the bass, too."

I think people are lonely and desperate for attention and unemployed and bored. I don't mean that these are losers that live with their mom, although that is true for many of these people. I think people in general are literally underemployed and lonely and bored in this country because of the economic downturn, and because of the isolation that's available because of the internet. The internet has both freed people up to connect with each other and isolated them.

There's all this evidence that we leave now of our life, especially if you're a comedian or an entertainer. I mean, I guess that was always kind of true, but now there's a lot more. We leave a deeper trail. Like a snail trail of our memories, you know? But it's not really about arousal. It's about artistic droppings.

life becomes satire in real time, what good is the premiere satire magazine? It might as well just be the newspaper. You could pick up The Wall Street Journal and be like, "Oh, what a funny Onion headline!" And then the editor of The Onion is like, "Huh. I guess you won't be needing me anymore."

When I first started comedy, before I kind of gained any national prominence, I - in a weird way - went back to that. Marc Maron had me on WTF making fun of me about that when I first opened for him. I had this very kind of hip-hop bravado to me, and I realized that now I've let some of that go in my stage presence, that maybe that was because I had dropped that completely from my life, and when I got onstage I sort of rekindled it. And I think now that it was perhaps a defense mechanism that was left over from those days, which I think is kind of interesting.

I knew what I wanted to do when I set out. I knew that I wanted to write a book that told the story, obviously. I wanted it be comedy first, because I felt like there already had been childhood druggy stories that were very serious, and I felt that the unique thing here was that I was a comic and I could tell the story with some levity, and I have been laughing at these stories my whole life.