Every Time You Hear Someone Read Your

I'm Being Provided With Some Emotional Ballast By Giving Me An Intimate Portrait Of One Character In Particular In Contrast To The Collective. I'm Fortunate That I Had Very Sympathetic Readers, But Ordinarily - If A Book Makes You Laugh Too Much, It Shifts From "literature" To "entertainment."

We Told Him To Get On With It. We Liked Wasting Time, But Almost Nothing Was More Annoying Than Having Our Wasted Time Wasted On Something Not Worth Wasting It On.

There Were Times Where I Felt I Was Pressing A Little Bit Too Hard With The Humor, And I Had To Pull Back, Because The Overriding Concern Of The Book Was To Create This Disease That Had No Cure And Make You Pay Attention To Every Emotional Stage Of What Happens.

A Child, Thought Carl, Is Not The Only Result Of Childbirth. A Mother, Too, Is Born. You See Them Every Day--nondescript Women With A Bulge Just Above The Groin, Slightly Double-chinned. Perpetually Forty. Someone's Mother, You Think. There Is A Child Somewhere Who Has Made This Woman Into A Mother, And For The Sake Of The Child She Has Altered Her Appearance To Better Play The Part.

Comedy Is Like Fictional Charm. It's The Charm Of Fiction. Or The Charisma Of Fiction. When You Meet Somebody Who's Immediately Charismatic, You're Attracted To That Person. And In Fiction It's Got To Come Out In Either One Of Two Ways: In The Prose Itself, And You're Hooked Immediately Because You Never Want To Leave Such A Colorful And Penetrating World. Or, It's Simply Being A Funny Writer.