No one wants to know how clever you are. They don't want an insight into your mind, thrilling as it might be. They want an insight into their own.

I have very fond memories of swimming in Walden Pond when we lived in Boston. You'd swim past a log and see all these turtles sunning themselves. Slightly disturbing if you thought about how many more were swimming around your toes, but also rather wonderful.

Bore children, and they stop reading. There's no room for self-indulgence or showing off or setting the scene.

Madness doesn't happen to someone alone. Very few people have experiences that are theirs alone.

The joke in our family is that we can cry reading the phone book.

I'm a Jewish son of Russian-Hungarian heritage parents. Humor was very important. My whole goal was to make my parents laugh. And my whole strategy as a young man was, if I could make them laugh, I could have enough time to figure out what to do next.

The rejection that we all take and the sadness and the aggravation and the loss of jobs and all of the things that we live through in our lives, without a sense of humor, I don't know how people make it.

I think comedy is something I enjoy, so it comes effortlessly.