I love [my parents], but what if I could really talk to them? I mean, what if they had some answers? Or would that just be too weird?

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

I work sometimes from outlines, which are immediately abandoned. Sometimes, when I'm trying to find the characters, I'll sketch things out a bit. Sometimes, outlines help me aim a little bit, but I tend to find it's usually much more interesting, especially with the first draft, to spew it onto the page. I used to get very nervous that, if I write this first rough draft and I die that night, whoever finds it might think that I thought it was good. For me, it's much more important to get some general shape onto the page and later take all the time I need to refine it, fix it, and rewrite it.

Writing is 90 percent procrastination: reading magazines, eating cereal out of the box, watching infomercials.

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.

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.

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).