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?

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

The other possibility was that there was no right thing to say, that the choice wasn't between right and wrong but between wrong, more wrong, and as wrong as you can get.

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

...aware, as always, that the truth isn't much of substitute for a good answer.

I read pretty voraciously. If it's good, I don't care what it is.