"I proved to my own satisfaction that I am madder than I think."

"I got sober. I stopped killing myself with alcohol. I began to think: 'Wait a minute - if I can stop doing this, what are the possibilities?' And slowly it dawned on me that it was maybe worth the risk."

"I think that clearly it has an influence, to be coming of age during the punk rock era, to come from a difficult and sporadically violent background, to have been in and out of such chaos, I think it actually helps. But I don't know for sure."

"I think comedy comes more from a low sense of self-esteem, and I certainly have that."

"A bad book is the worse that it cannot repent. It has not been the devil's policy to keep the masses of mankind in ignorance; but finding that they will read, he is doing all in his power to poison their books."

"Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pocket. But I found it would be too long and the age of the great epics is past."

"Short-story writing requires an exquisite sense of balance. Novelists, frankly, can get away with more. A novel can have a dull spot or two, because the reader has made a different commitment."

"It was deeply important for me to understand where Mandela came from. Because we know where he was going, and that's a famous story, but who was he? Where did he come from? What was his upbringing?"