I turned forty, and I'm finally going to get married and maybe have a kid.

So while it is true that I find really dark stuff funny sometimes, it's also true that as a writer of books I want to have the whole range of human emotions.

Impotence, fetishism, bisexuality, and bondage are all facts of life, and our fiction should reflect that.

I'm trying to make sure that there's comedy as well as sadness. It makes the sadness more memorable.

Nonfiction that uses novelistic devices and strategies to shape the work. That's material that I really like.

I always wanted to write something illustrated, and the Details strip finally gave me the opportunity.

It's also true, however, that having conquered the regional writer ghetto, I am now intent on conquering the nationalist writer ghetto and moving out into the world more.

What genre it falls under is only of interest later.

This is odd, but there are certain things that are really embarrassing to talk about - one is my job and the success that I've had in it, and the other is money.

It turns out that my memory is just not that great, so for specific scenes with people doing stuff, sometimes I'd have the details all wrong or I couldn't remember what happened exactly, so I just let that be.

I suppose I should say that I treasure blasphemy, as a faith of the highest order.

But that incessant drive to be out there in the literary universe that was important to me when I was in my twenties, like going to a Paris Review party or whatever, that seems totally irrelevant now.

I'm trying to read more dead people because I keep having to read stuff for juries and so forth.

My grandfather was a newspaper publisher and his paper had all the comics in NYC, so some of my earliest memories are of reading the family paper and heading straight for the comics insert.

I love comic books and always did as a kid.

Writing the book was itself a process of concealing and revealing.

Genre is a bookstore problem, not a literary problem.

The process of composition, messing around with paragraphs and trying to make really good prose, is hardwired into my personality.

When prose gets too stylized and out of control - and Stein is sometimes a good example - when you don't know what the hell is going on, then it's kind of boring.

I have worked really hard to defy categorization, to break down a taxonomy whenever it comes my way.

I made this list of stuff that it's time for me to try to do.

The point is to balance on the edge between musicality and content.

Literature precedes genre.

All the stuff that I used to treat with contempt - you know, I'm an artist, man, I don't do that family stuff - has begun to seem really important.

The Ice Storm, because of the movie, has had, or is to have, a vigorous life in other cultures.

I am in Boston right now, in fact, to do work at the New England Historical Genealogical Library, where I'm trying to finish up tracing my lineage back to the seventeenth century.

Maybe when I'm sixty-five I'll talk about my literary life.

I turned forty, and I'm finally going to get married and maybe have a kid.

I didn't know how to kill off a character unless I was able, as a narrator, to get really complicated. Because it was a big deal. I'd never killed a character before.

My contention is that that style is just as stylized as an ornate style.

I judged about a zillion awards this year so I've been reading a lot of books that just came out.

A bed is where a sense of shared purpose first takes root.

Impotence fetishism bisexuality and bondage are all facts of life and our fiction should reflect that.

I am so tired of being told by Democratic operatives to "suck it up" because so many other profound issues are at stake.

I don't want to put one innocent person to death to put 99 that are guilty to death. So philosophically I'm a tooth-for-tooth guy, but the reality is the death penalty as public policy is flawed.

Students graduating with high debt encounter difficulties in qualifying for home and automobile loans.

When its foggy in the pulpit its cloudy in the pew.

When I write, I write the drum beat. Though sometimes I write on piano or guitar.

When it comes to chocolate, resistance is futile.

I do believe in praising that which deserves to be praised.

'Weekend Update' can be presented as a full 20-minute sketch, and there's a lot of room there.

I think I've always wanted to be different from everybody else. I get really annoyed when I do something and everybody else does it too, or if I'm doing something that everybody else is doing.

That's absolutely correct and in addition to that life just isn't an accident of the laws of physics. There's a long list of experiments that suggest just the opposite.

More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones.

I do think musical-theater actors can get a bad rap, and I see why. There is a certain slickness - there's nothing better than an amazing musical, but an okay musical can be one of the worst times you've ever had.

We all want heroes and we all want somebody to look up to.

Catholic schools in Indonesia routinely accept non-Catholic students, but exempt them from studying religion. Obama's school documents, though, wrongly list him as being Indonesian.

New York feels like sometimes it's not part of the United States. So does L.A. Chicago feels like it's a big city that's part of America.

It can happen that a book, unlike its authors, grows younger as the years pass.