When you slip on a banana peel, people laugh at you. But when you tell people you slipped on a banana peel, it's your laugh.

Reading is everything. Reading makes me feel like I've accomplished something, learned something, become a better person. Reading makes me smarter. Reading gives me something to talk about later on. Reading is the unbelievably healthy way my attention deficit disorder medicates itself. Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it's a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it's a way of making contact with someone else's imagination after a day that's all too real. Reading is grist. Reading is bliss.

I live in New York City. I could never live anywhere else. The events of September 11 forced me to confront the fact that no matter what, I live here and always will. One of my favorite things about New York is that you can pick up the phone and order anything and someone will deliver it to you. Once I lived for a year in another city, and almost every waking hour of my life was spent going to stores, buying things, loading them into the car, bringing them home, unloading them, and carrying them into the house. How anyone gets anything done in these places is a mystery to me.

The last four years of psychoanalysis are a waste of money.

These days most women have jobs that last way too long. A lot of people in New York barely have time to get laid.

I know that I am essentially a sort of fun-loving person who really just wants to sit around and eat pies.

If Sigmund Freud had watched Phil Donahue he would never have wondered what women want.