Stand-up Comedy Had An Interesting Effect On

I Have An Enduring, Very Robust Infatuation With Dictators. I Have An Infatuation With Stalin, Mao, And Mussolini. In The Paris Review Interview I Did (in 2013), I Said My Next Book, This One, Was Going To Be About Mussolini. I Wound Up Only Having A Mussolini Cameo In The Book.

When You Are A Child, You Often Stare Too Closely At The Wrong Thing. I Remember The First Time I Was Taken To Yankee Stadium. Someone Had Spilled Something Sweet Earlier In The Day And The Ground Was Covered With Ants. I Spent The Whole Game Staring At The Ants, And That Was More Fascinating Than The Game.

You Are Fiercely Heterosexual And Well-formed, And It's No One's Business That You've Shrunk Your Parents And Keep Them In A Terranium, But You Have A Gatling Gun For A Mouth, And If That's A Diary You're Producing From Your Cleavage, I'm Leaving.

When I Started, I Wanted To Be Thought Of As Tortured And Seductive, Not Funny, But Humor Tends To Be A Reflexive Part Of A Person's Sensibility. It's An Almost Impossible Thing To Teach Anyone, Which Leads Me To Believe That It's Intuitive.

One Of The Things That Struck Me As Unique About Hollywood Is That I Never Had Bad Meetings. There Were All Enthusiastic, But Meaninglessly Enthusiastic.