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

You use simple brushstrokes in a screenplay for things over which you would take much greater pains in a novel.

If there's an enduring theme in my work, it's probably the effects of class on American life.

I can be glib and truthful all at once.

I suppose all writers worry about the well running dry.

It's no secret that in my books I'm trying to make the comic and the serious rub up against each other just as closely and uncomfortably as I can.

I'm delighted by how Nobody's Fool turned out. It was a rare movie.

HBO is really famous for hiring good people and staying out of their way until they ask for help, or need it. And that reputation is earned.

Structure is one of the things that I always hope will reveal itself to me.

Usually by the time I finish a book tour I've just about had it with the book.

I looked back at some of my earlier published stories with genuine horror and remorse. I got thinking, How many extant copies might there be, who owns them, and do they keep their doors locked?

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

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

I was pretty dead set against ever writing an academic novel. It's always been my view that there are already more than enough academic novels and that most of them aren't any good. Most of them are self-conscious and bitter, the work of people who want to settle grudges.

What comes easiest for me is dialogue. Sometimes when my characters are speaking to me, I have to slow them down so that I'm not simply taking dictation.

I want that which is hilarious and that which is heartbreaking to occupy the same territory in the book because I think they very often occupy the same territory in life, much as we try to separate them.

I think a lot of what is going on with kids who get pushed too far and attempt either murder or suicide is that they are trying to deal with their own non-existence for the people who are supposed to care most for them.

Even at its most perceptive, sociology deals in abstractions.

If my career continues along its current arc, people will probably look at me and see a writer who is obsessed with the relationship between rich and poor and with how the rich somehow or other always manage to betray the poor, even when they don't mean to.

When I look back over my novels what I find is that when I think I'm finished with a theme, I'm generally not. And usually themes will recur from novel to novel in odd, new guises.

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

What does it feel like to be a parent? What does it feel like to be a child? And that's what stories do. They bring you there. They offer a dramatic explanation, which is always different from an expository explanation.

Some authors have a very hard time understanding that in order to be faithful to the spirit of the book, it's almost always impossible to remain faithful to the text. You have to make changes.

When I start getting close to the end of a novel, something registers in the back of my mind for the next novel, so that I usually don't write, or take notes. And I certainly don't begin. I just allow things to percolate for a while.

A lot of my characters in all of my books have a self-destructive urge. They'll do precisely the thing that they know is wrong, take a perverse delight in doing the wrong thing.

When authors who write literary fiction begin to write screenplays, everybody assumes that's the end. Here's another who's never going to write well again.

I don't think there's a shortage of material in the world. Or in my head. I just pray for continued good health, because I've got other stories to tell.

Movies have to handle time very efficiently. They're about stringing scenes together in the present. Novels aren't necessarily about that.

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.

I think that if people are instructed about anything, it should be about the nature of cruelty. And about why people behave so cruelly to each other. And what kind of satisfactions they derive from it. And why there is always a cost, and a price to be paid.

My books are elegiac in the sense that they're odes to a nation that even I sometimes think may not exist anymore except in my memory and my imagination.

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

Ultimately, your theme will find you. You don't have to go looking for it.

By ignoring a lot of American culture you can write more interesting stories. Unfortunately, if you were writing about America as it is, you'd be writing about a lot of people sitting in front of television sets.

You can be interested in a Jane Smiley novel whether or not anyone says a word. She enters into her characters' thoughts with great understanding and depth.

You just kind of have faith. If that sounds kind of mystical, it's because I really don't know how it works, but I trust that it does. I try to write the way I read, in order to find out what happens next.

I have to have a character worth caring about. I tend not to start writing books about people I don't have a lot of sympathy for because I'm just going to be with them too long.

People in small towns, much more than in cities, share a destiny.

I mean, all alternative comedy is are comedians that have being doing it for so long, for so long, that they were relaxed enough to start becoming personal on stage.

The kinds of shows that seem to work now, the comedy shows, are those which require very little attention. They're superficial and I like articulate comedy.

A lot of people have gotten into comedy because of certain influences in their lives or events that were painful, and I really have wracked my brain to figure it out. I pretty much have had a normal childhood. Maybe it was too normal.

I grew up wanting to make movies, and along the way I suddenly found that I had a career doing comedy.

I really enjoy comedy. It's a real challenge.

I've mainly been in dramas, so this is one of my first comedy kind of performances in Cecil B. Demented.

Well I sure had been looking for a comedy for years without any success.

Comedy is so hard; it's so much harder than drama. The pacing of it, the energy of it.

Stand-up comedy and poverty. Those were my two main endeavors.

It seems like when I first started, people got into comedy because they wanted to be good comedians.

It is really hard to do comedy; it takes a lot of energy and focus. It's rather like music: It's a lot of hitting notes precisely.