If my career continues along its current arc, people will probably look at me and see a writer who is obsessed with the relationship between rich and poor and with how the rich somehow or other always manage to betray the poor, even when they don't mean to.

I'll tell you one thing, though. It's a terrible thing to be a disappointment to a good woman.

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

At the risk of appearing disingenuous, I don't really think of myself as 'writing humor.' I'm simply reporting on the world I observe, which is frequently hilarious.

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

What I discovered I liked best about striking out on my bicycle was that the farther I got from home, the more interesting and unusual my thoughts became.

Who but an English professor would threaten to kill a duck a day and hold up a goose as an example?