"If you paid me for work," continued Max, whose rhetoric was more sophisticated than you might expect from a man with food in his beard, "I wouldn't have to feel worthless. There's not law says old people have to feel worthless all the while, you know. You paid me, I'd have some dignity." Now it was Mile's turn to nod and smile agreeably. "I think the dignity ship set sail a long time ago, Dad."

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

... Baggott enjoys living on the knife edge between hilarity and heartbreak and that makes her a writer after my own heart.

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

I think it would be harder for me not to write comedy because the comic view of things is the one that comes most naturally to me.

Even at its most perceptive, sociology deals in abstractions.

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