We didn't have television until I was about eight years old so it was either the movies or radio. A lot of radio drama. That was our television you know. We had to use our imagination. So it was really those two things and the comics that I immersed myself in as a child.

I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.

I think up until the point when we started in the business which was in the early '70s most of the humor was political. The smart humor was political satire.

Humor can help you cope with the unbearable so that you can stay on the bright side of things until the bright side actually comes along.

Absurdity is what I like most in life and there's humor in struggling in ignorance. If you saw a man repeatedly running into a wall until he was a bloody pulp after a while it would make you laugh because it becomes absurd.

I hope to keep entertaining in some way until I can't physically entertain any longer. It's what I was born to do and I love this profession.

You cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you.

In the later books I am much more at home in the use of language to describe things. I had never thought of that until a critic pointed that out.

In school I was pretty quiet. Kinda shy until my junior year. But at home I was a freak.

In the theatre people talk. Talk talk until the cows come home about journeys of discovery and about what Hazlitt thought of a line of Shakespeare. I can't stand it.