It's no secret that in my books I'm trying to make the comic and the serious rub up against each other just as closely and uncomfortably as I can.

I think that if people are instructed about anything, it should be about the nature of cruelty. And about why people behave so cruelly to each other. And what kind of satisfactions they derive from it. And why there is always a cost, and a price to be paid.

You can't possibly judge your ability to control something until you've experienced the extremes of its capabilities. Do you understand?

I don't think America has ever had a center the way London is the center of England or Dublin is the center of Ireland.

He'd discovered that his memories of that summer were like bad movie montages - young lovers tossing a Frisbee in the park, sharing a melting ice-cream cone, bicycling along the river, laughing, talking, kissing, a sappy score drowning out the dialogue because the screenwriter had no idea what these two people might say to each other.

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

Was anything in the world truer than that intuitive leap of the heart?