Of all the questions I'm asked, the most difficult is, "How does it feel to be famous?" Since I'm not, that question always catches me with a feeling of surrealism....I've got three kids and I've changed all their diapers, and when it's two o'clock in the morning and you're changing something that's sort of special delivery with one eye open and one eye shut you don't feel famous.

If something is accessible to a lot of people, it's got to be dumb because most people are dumb.

Anything with the power to make you laugh over thirty years later isn’t a waste of time. I think something like that is very close to immortality.

There's nothing like stories on a windy night when folks have found a warm place in a cold world.

Life was such a wheel that no man could stand upon it for long. And it always, at the end, came round to the same place again.

Let's get one thing clear right now, shall we? There is no Idea Dump, no Story Central, no Island of the Buried Bestsellers; good story ideas seem to come quite literally from nowhere, sailing at you right out of the empty sky: two previously unrelated ideas come together and make something new under the sun. Your job isn't to find these ideas but to recognize them when they show up.

There's a saying - "Write what you know." It's bad advice if you take it as an unbreakable rule, but good advice if you use it as a foundation.