It's funny to be a critic.

I think the pattern of my essays is A funny thing happened to me on my way through Finnegans Wake.

Hemingway seems to be in a funny position. People nowadays can't identify with him closely as a member of their own generation and he isn't yet historical.

I have only been funny about seventy four per cent of the time. Yes I think that is right. Seventy-four per cent of the time.

I've thought for the last decade or so the only actual place raw truth was seeping through in newspapers was on the Comics Pages. They were able to pull off intelligent social comment pure truths not found elsewhere in the news pages and had the ability to make it all funny entertaining and pertinent.

I love readings and my readers but the din of voices of the audience gives me stage fright and the din of voices inside whisper that I am a fraud and that the jig is up. Surely someone will rise up from the audience and say out loud that not only am I not funny and helpful but I'm annoying and a phony.

Actually I never did stand up. I'm not that funny.

Sometimes I think what I write is funny in its quiet way.

When I was a little kid I wrote this play about all these characters living in a haunted house. There was a witch who lived there and a mummy. When they were all hassling him this guy who bought the house - I can't believe I remember this - he said to them 'Who's paying the mortgage on this haunted house?' I thought that was really funny.

I actually think of being funny as an odd turn of mind like a mild disability some weird way of looking at the world that you can't get rid of.