If you try to write 1,000 words a day, as I do, after 100 days you'll look up and have a book. It may be a mess, and you may have to revise it 50 times, but you can't revise it if you haven't written it.

Choosing writing as a career, just by itself, is a measure of not being a calculating person.

One of the things you get to do as a writer is that you get to learn new stuff all the time, and I hope that I'm a better writer when I'm 70 than I was when I was 30. That's one of the great things about a literary career.

Writing is a job: you must show up.

I think there's a responsibility more as an artist to try and push in the direction you think comedy should go... The biggest thing I could do for the art that I love was keeping it art: keeping it special, keeping it honest, keeping it truthful.

My biggest superhero of writing is Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentine fabulist. He's an amazingly perceptive writer, but also willing to make a joke.

Before the money or anything, number one, it was just to put out real music, real stuff with a passion, real art.

I have never separated the writing of poetry from prayer. I have grown up believing it is a vocation, a religious vocation.