There's a big difference between the National Book Awards and the Academy Awards. At the Academy Awards you can feel the greed and envy and ego. Whereas the National Book Awards are in New York.

A day without sunshine is like, you know, night.

...it is not the big events that hurt the most but rather the smallest questionable shift in tone at the end of a spoken word that can plow most deeply into the heart.

I'm trying to think of other ones. Oh, yeah, I'd say - somebody would buy something and we'd say, and because you are our hundredth customer today, you get a free paperback.

Rebelliousness really is the province of young people-that kind of iconoclasm.

At first I had no skills in writing comedy. I didn't know what a joke was, but, as someone once told me, your emotions follow your intent. If you create the intention of starting a comedy act, slowly your mind starts adjusting and you arrive at a new emotional state.

Art as an aesthetic principle was supported by thousands of years of discernment and psychic rewards, but art as a commodity was held up by air. The loss of confidence that affected banks and financial instruments was not affecting cherubs, cupids and flattened popes. The objects hadn't changed: what was there before was there after. But a vacancy was created with the clamoring crowds deserted and retrenched.