That's all I've ever dreamed of, Mr. Bones. To make the world a better place. To bring some beauty to the drab humdrum corners of the soul. You can do it with a toaster, you can do it with a poem, you can do it by reaching out your hand to a stranger. It doesn't matter what form it takes. To leave the world a little better than you found it. That's the best a man can ever do.

Let me tell you, there's no better medicine than a friendly card game for sloughing off the cares of a workaday world.

Brooklyn has a bit of everything - some of the most beautiful things in America, and some of the most wretched, ugly, impoverished things.

How can you think about the world without factoring in the unforseen, the fluke event?

Chance is an element of life. What I try to do is study what I call the mechanics of reality as carefully as I can.

I think that sense of unreality inspired me to write the story within the book that [August] Brill tells himself, one of the stories he tells himself.

The joke is the purest, most essential form of storytelling. Every word has to count.