Humor can be an incredible, lacerating and effective weapon.

Humor can be an incredible, lacerating and effective weapon.

They have a crystalline sense of right and wrong; it disappears when they walk out the door with their M.B.A.

Disney's something to be a little alarmed about. It's not just a little theme park anymore. It's now an ethic and outlook and strategy that goes way beyond central Florida.

The first rule of hurricane coverage is that every broadcast must begin with palm trees bending in the wind.

All novels are about crime. You'd be hard pressed to find any novel that does not have an element of crime. I don't see myself as a crime novelist, but there are crimes in my books. That's the nature of storytelling, if you want to reflect the real world.

Everybody's idea of a great book is different, of course. For me it's one that makes my jaw drop on every page, the writing is so original.

Good satire comes from anger. It comes from a sense of injustice, that there are wrongs in the world that need to be fixed. And what better place to get that well of venom and outrage boiling than a newsroom, because you're on the front lines.

I don't have an e-reader. One reason is that I like to dog-ear the page when I find a particularly good sentence or passage.

I got overwhelmed by the magnitude of the celebrity culture in America. My background is as a news journalist, and newsrooms in the US are shrinking - investigation teams are being terminated or shrunk on newspapers all around the country. The one aspect that's expanded is coverage of celebrity culture.

I never laugh or smile when I am writing. When I come home for lunch after writing all morning, my wife says I look like I just came home from a funeral. This is not bragging. This is an illness.

I'd love to see a good script of one of my books, in these years of animations and comic book sequels, and had so many written over the years, but none quite clicked.

If you write satire, the guilty pleasure these days is that there's just so much material about. On the other hand, if you have a family it can be depressing.

My driving record is not exemplary, but I have never had a speeding ticket over 100 m.p.h. I can say that unequivocally.

My escape is to just get in a boat and disappear on the water.

My humour has always come from anger, but I have to make sure I don't just get angry and jump on a soapbox.

Nobody with an IQ higher than emergency-room temperature could ever believe that 'death panels' would be appointed to nudge the elderly toward euthanasia. Yet for idle entertainment, it's hard to beat Sarah Palin's ignorant nattering on the subject.

Obviously you have to make a profit to put out a newspaper. I'm not an idiot. But when the margins are in excess of 25 per cent you're talking about greed.

One problem with age is that patience begins to ebb.

The Florida in my novels is not as seedy as the real Florida. It's hard to stay ahead of the curve. Every time I write a scene that I think is the sickest thing I have ever dreamed up, it is surpassed by something that happens in real life.

The greatest sin for a writer is to be boring.

There is no writer's block in a newsroom. There's only unemployment block.

Unfortunately, I don't get to read nearly as much as I want because I'm always working on my own stuff, either the novels or newspaper columns.

We've always been fascinated with movie stars and singers, but the fascination with people who really have nothing to offer is something new.

When I'm working on a novel of my own, I try to read mostly nonfiction, although sometimes I break down and peek at something else.

When you put on the suits, when you pretend you're honest and you're robbing at a far higher level, these guys deserve to... well, to be in my novels, and I have special fates reserved for them.

You can do the best research and be making the strongest intellectual argument, but if readers don't get past the third paragraph you've wasted your energy and valuable ink.

Men live by intervals of reason under the sovereignty of humor and passion.

Humor can help you cope with the unbearable so that you can stay on the bright side of things until the bright side actually comes along.

It is the ability to take a joke, not make one, that proves you have a sense of humor.

What we're doing is fun - if you have any sense of humor at all!

You've got to have a sense of humor to keep your sanity.

I don't think I could ever do a network sitcom because the humor is often based on some trite circumstance. I don't want to be a part of a show where it's mostly about coming up with the jokes.

All my jobs have been with food in one way or another since 1948. My parents were in the hotel business, and I just loved the warm hearted people who worked so hard with such good humor.

You can turn painful situations around through laughter. If you can find humor in anything, even poverty, you can survive it.

The man with the real sense of humor is the man who can put himself in the spectator's place and laugh at his own misfortune.

Advertisers also know that humor can help bond us to their product.

I am a great believer that what makes our show different is the humor.

The comic is the perception of the opposite; humor is the feeling of it.

Through humor, you can soften some of the worst blows that life delivers. And once you find laughter, no matter how painful your situation might be, you can survive it.

Once we got over the origin story, we could really delve deeper into their lives and characters and angst. So this movie actually has more heart, more humor.

Incongruity, they say, is one of the main ingredients of humor. Maybe it's because everybody can feel superior to me. I honestly don't know.

I love Sell Out, I think it's great. I love the jingles. The whole thing as an album is a wonderful piece of work. The cover. Everything about it. It's got humor, great songs, irony.

In some sort of crude sense, which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.

I'm not for gratuitous nudity, but if there's humor, I don't have a problem.

It felt as if things were literally slipping through my fingers. Things were just streaming away from me. I lost my sense of humor. I'm still looking for that.

Robert Walker as Bruno was excellent. He had elegance and humor, and the proper fondness for his mother.

I'm not really big on slapstick humor. I like gentle humor.

But it also became the experience, or was the experience, of the writers who were attracted to this kind of humor. They're all men or women who come from the same kind of experience in their own lives.