America has always been a nation of small places, and as we lose them, we're losing part of ourselves.

I'm not an easy man. I can be an entertaining one, though it's been my experience that most people don't want to be entertained. They want to be comforted.

I think it would be harder for me not to write comedy because the comic view of things is the one that comes most naturally to me.

I was pretty dead set against ever writing an academic novel. It's always been my view that there are already more than enough academic novels and that most of them aren't any good. Most of them are self-conscious and bitter, the work of people who want to settle grudges.

If you work at comedy too laboriously, you can kill what's funny in the joke.

I read pretty voraciously. If it's good, I don't care what it is.

Go to it. Be bold. Be true. Be kind. Rotate your tires. Don't drink so much. There aren't going to be enough liver transplants to go around.