Most authors writing books like 'He's Just Not That Into You' dream of doing what I was being asked to do. I didn't like it. I'm good at giving advice, but doing it on TV and radio felt wrong, and when people resisted my point of view, I was like, 'Why am I doing this? This was not the plan.' So I stopped. It didn't make me feel good.

We were raised to pursue women... Most of the guys I know enjoy the pursuit. But that doesn't mean women should be wallflowers.

I think probably - I think, you know, when you're first dating somebody, if they're just not that physical with you, if they don't want to make concrete plans with you, you know, if they're sort of ambiguous about where everything is going, I think that's a pretty good sign that they're not into you.

I've never tried to pass myself off as anything more than a comedian who wrote a dating book.

There is - I mean - I found early in life that righteous indignation is a little off-putting, and so I try to couch it with humor.

If I can't see the humor in it, how am I going to be funny?

I'm hugely negative, so if a joke doesn't land it takes me a long time to get over it. If something doesn't go well I go dark in my head. Basically I start thinking it should be illegal for me to be doing comedy.

A comic strip that your parents read when they were young is a curious thing: it's an heirloom, and it's also intimate. You peer through windows and look at the things that made your elders laugh, and then you wonder whether the laugh really belongs to you.