"When I was a kid, my step-dad, who raised me, used to buy me books as Christmas gifts. He was an intellectual from another era, and believed that some kind of moral salvation lay in a combination of books, public education, and paying as much taxes as you could. When I was in sixth grade, he bought me the trilogy of children’s books by E.B. White, which included Trumpet of the Swan, Charlotte’s Web, and Stuart Little. The same year, I got a satin comforter from my mom, and I remember lying in my antique brass bed, propped up on those luxurious new pillows, and going on the wild rides of these stories; it seems like I didn’t leave my bed until I’d finished all three. I’d always liked to read, but it was the experience of binging on those three children’s books that really showed me what reading did to me, and for me—the way reading made me feel calm and inspired before I knew what those words meant—and that I was, in my heart, a reader, which really, then, was the beginning of it all, since writers are just readers who need a job."

"I’ll start with This is Spinal Tap. It sort of took an American perspective to show the characters and the attitudes surrounding British rock bands in the 1970s and 1980s, which, I guess, was what it was supposed to be, and I just thought the characters drawn were so excellent. And yet, it was odd, because everyone involved was American. You’d think it’d be just the kind of thing that some British writers or comedians could’ve done better, but clearly we didn’t. And I thought Christopher Guest, et al., did it fantastically well. It’s just always a kind of reassuringly funny film. The best comedy is watching humans interact, and people with their own petty ambitions, and self delusions, and all that sort of stuff. And that movie is absolutely brim full of it. If they say that comedy is essentially exaggerated truth, that was almost the perfect exemplar of it, where it’s almost a documentary. Well, it is obviously a mockumentary, but you don’t have to exaggerate much for it to become inherently comic. So that’s kind of what it is. It’s a perfect exaggeration, but exaggerated not very much."