Comedy May Be Big Business But It

I've Been Writing For A Long Time, Since The Late '60s. But It Hasn't Been In The Same Form. I Used To Write Scripts For Television. I Wrote For My Comedy Act. Then I Wrote Screenplays, And Then I Started Writing New Yorker Essays, And Then I Started Writing Plays. I Didn't Start Writing Prose, Really, Until The New Yorker Essays, But They Were Comic. I Didn't Start Writing Prose, Really, Until The '90s. In My Head, There Was A Link Between Everything. One Thing Led To Another.

It [live Performance] Is Just Very Difficult. Doing An Hour, Hour And A Half Of Live Standup Is An Endurance Test. You Almost Have To Do It Every Day To Stay Up On It.

In Talking To Girls I Could Never Remember The Right Sequence Of Things To Say. I'd Meet A Girl And Say, Hi, Was It Good For You Too? If A Girl Spent The Night, I'd Wake Up In The Morning And Then Try To Get Her Drunk.

The Lure In Art Collecting And Its Financial Rewards, Not Counting For A Moment Its Aesthetic, Cultural And Intellectual Rewards, Is Like The Trust In Paper Money: It Makes No Sense When You Really Think About It. New Artistic Images Are So Vulnerable To Opinion That It Wouldn't Take Much More Than A Whim For A Small Group Of Collectors To Decide That A Contemporary Artist Was Not So Wonderful Anymore, Was So Last Year.

Teaching Is, After All, A Form Of Show Business.