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

I get and read an enormous number of first novels.

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'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.

You use simple brushstrokes in a screenplay for things over which you would take much greater pains in a novel.

To his surprise, she leaned over and kissed him on the forehead, a kiss so full of affection that it dispelled the awkwardness, even as it caused Miles' heart to plummet, because all kisses are calibrated, and this one revealed the great chasm between affection and love.

He looks like he could be taken in a fight. Not by me, but by somebody. Not anyone in Humanities, probably.