I don’t like to read anything on the radio for the very first time, because I don’t have any notion of a reaction. When I read it out loud, then I get an idea of that, and more of an idea of how to read.
There are lots of things that happen to me that I don’t write about.
It’s hard to love a place that’s outlawed smoking but finds it perfectly acceptable to serve raw fish in a bath of chocolate.
I always knew I wanted it to be illustrated.
People ask me, ‘Have you ever considered doing stand-up?’ To me it would be less offensive if someone asked me, ‘Have you ever considered dental implants?’
Usually, if I think something is really funny, it doesn’t get any reaction whatsoever.
Write relentlessly, until you find your voice. Then, use it.
No one writes dialect better than Flannery O’Connor. No one should even try.
My boyfriend got me a computer three years ago. I’ll admit it does make things a lot easier. When I was working on a typewriter and I whited out a line, often I would choose a word to go in the space just because it fit. Now I don’t have to do that.
Each one of us is left to choose our own quality of life and take pleasure where we find it with the understanding that, like Mom used to say, sooner or later something’s gonna get you.
I like to reserve the right to write about whatever I like.
I just think that the people who say: ‘That’s not true’ when someone tells a story at dinner are the people who didn’t get any laughs when they told their story.
Faced with an exciting question, science tended to provide the dullest possible answer. Ions might charge the air but they fell flat when it came to charging the imagination – my imagination, anyway.
In my dream world gay people in America would get the right to marry, and not a one of them would use that right.
I’ve always been very upfront about the way I write, and I’ve always used the tools humorists use, such as exaggeration.
It didn’t seem fair to me that Jon Stewart’s rally didn’t get the same kind of attention that Glenn Beck’s did. Why was Beck’s seen as checking the thermometer of the country, and Jon Stewart just dismissed as a satirist?
Every so often my life will feel like a story. It doesn’t have to be a big thing; in fact, most often, it’s just the opposite.
My conscience is crosswired with my sweat glands, but there’s a short in the system and I break out over things I didn’t do, which only makes me look more suspect.
I never got the idea of a punishing God, just a really boring one. To see people growing up in the Carolinas who were Baptist, I knew there were others who felt God was going to send them to hell for any little thing, but not me.
I tend to show everything I do to my family, to check they won’t be offended.