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.

One of the odd things about middle age, he concluded, was the strange decisions a man discovers he's made by not really making them, like allowing friends to drift away through simple neglect.

I told him the truth, that I loved him and didn't regret anything about our lives together. But do we ever 'tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God' as my father used to say, to those we love? Or even to ourselves? Don't even the best and most fortunate of lives hint at other possibilities, at a different kind of sweetness and, yes, bitterness too? Isn't this why we can't help feeling cheated, even when we know we haven't been?

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.

I think the darker aspect of my fiction-or anybody's fiction-is by its very nature somehow easier to talk about.

People often ask me how I make things funny. I don't make things funny.

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