They stayed, many of them, because staying was easier and less scary than leaving.

A short story is something that I think can be intuited and envisioned and held in your mind almost at once.

Not everyone writes well from a child's point of view.

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

My books are elegiac in the sense that they're odes to a nation that even I sometimes think may not exist anymore except in my memory and my imagination.

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.

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.