As a writer, I need an enormous amount of time alone. Writing is 90 percent procrastination: reading magazines, eating cereal out of the box, watching infomercials. It's a matter of doing everything you can to avoid writing, until it is about four in the morning and you reach the point where you have to write. Having anybody watching that or attempting to share it with me would be grisly.

I believe in a benevolent God not because He created the Grand Canyon or Michelangelo, but because He gave us snacks.

I think people who make checklists are the most miserable and alone because they are looking for the perfect Entenmann's that is delicious and has no calories. Please, you want a brunette with a sense of humor, a doctorate and HIV-negative status? Good luck, honey. Love isn't so frequent that you can put conditions on it.

Whenever I stumble over my own feet, or blurt out a thought that makes no sense at all, or leave the house wearing one pattern too many, I always think, 'It's okay, I'm from New Jersey.' I love New Jersey, because it's not just an all-purpose punch line, but probably a handy legal defense, as in 'Yes, I shot my wife because I thought she was Bigfoot, but I'm from New Jersey.'

There is only one blasphemy, and that is the refusal to experience joy.

I just saw Titanic, which is a $200 million film about a real-life disaster at sea, but according to Hollywood Logic, none of the actual passengers was interesting enough, so the writer-director had to invent a Romeo and Juliet-style fictional couple to heat up the catastrophe. This seems a tiny bit like giving Anne Frank a wacky best friend, to perk up that attic.

The only thing I have ever been asked [by a pollster] was the age at which I first indulged in oral sex (which, since it was a Yale Daily News poll, meant kissing).