Every summer, I regret that I didn't become a college teacher. Such a sweet life! With all that vacation time! You'll never get me to believe that being a tenured professor at a good college is anything but Heaven on earth.

Deep in my cortex, the year is divided into reading seasons. The period from mid-October to Christmas, for instance, is 'ghost story' time, while Jane Austen and P. G. Wodehouse pretty much own April and May.

For years, I meant to read 'Arabian Sands', Wilfred Thesiger's account of two punishing camel journeys during the late 1940s across Southern Arabia's Empty Quarter. Now that I have, I can sheepishly join the chorus of those who revere the book as one of the half dozen greatest works of modern English travel writing.

When I was a boy in the late 1950s, the public library refused to stock books by Edgar Rice Burroughs. They were regarded as vulgar, ill-written potboilers.

A job should bring enough for a worker and family to live on, but after that, self-realization, the exercise of one's gifts and talents, is what truly matters.

It's a sad commentary on our time - to use a phrase much favored by my late father - that people increasingly celebrate Christmas Day by going to the movies.

Like most people, I find watching the lazy and quiet underwater realm of a big aquarium exceptionally calming.

You ever read a book that changed your life? Me neither.

My wife and I, we work together. And we wrote this book, "Dad Is Fat." And in the book, I was encouraged constantly by my editor to be more personal and talk about more personal experiences.

Whatever a writer gets paid for his book, it's never enough. I think that's true. It's hard work. But in the end, you wrote a book. It's something real and tangible that sits on a shelf forever.

Ever read a book that changed your life? Me neither.

I don't have any delusions. I'm not a novelist - I'm a comedian who writes. I love doing the stand-up and the touring and the albums and all that, but it's pretty amazing to go into a library and see your book there.

'The Chronicles of Narnia' books are great.

I write about what I'm going through.

I like short stories.

I must say, when I reread myself, it's the poetry I tend to look at. It's the most exciting to write, and it's over the quickest.

New York is, of course, many cities, and an exile does not return to the one he left.

It's so hard to make a good tee shot after a birdie.

Somehow, it is hard to dislike a man once you have played a round of golf with him.

I've always tried to write about America. It's very worth a writer's effort.

I love Shillington not as one loves Capri or New York, because they are special, but as one loves one's own body and consciousness, because they are synonymous with being.

If my mother hadn't been trying to be a writer, I don't know if I would have thought of it myself.

Books externalise our brains and turn our homes into thinking bodies.

In becoming an icon, it is useful to die young.