“Truth be told, I'm not an easy man. I can be an entertaining one, though it's been my experience that most people don't want to be entertained. They want to be comforted.”
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Movies have to handle time very efficiently. They're about stringing scenes together in the present. Novels aren't necessarily about that.
If you work at comedy too laboriously, you can kill what's funny in the joke.
At the risk of appearing disingenuous, I don't really think of myself as 'writing humor.' I'm simply reporting on the world I observe, which is frequently hilarious.
My books are elegiac in the sense that they're odes to a nation that even I sometimes think may not exist anymore except in my memory and my imagination.