People will kill you over time, and how they'll kill you is with tiny, harmless phrases, like 'be realistic.'
I have a very low level of recognition, which is fine by me.
I'm not drunk onstage, although I've done that a couple of times when I was younger. It's partly just the way I talk - I talk like somebody in a rocking chair. I'm your 150-year-old grandmother.
I think that women just have a primeval instinct to make soup, which they will try to foist on anybody who looks like a likely candidate.
Some people have told me that I'm grumpy; it's not something that I'm aware of. It's not like I walk around poking children in the eye... not very small ones, anyway.
Children are the most honest critics. They will say 'You're funny', but also 'You're pathetic - go away.'
I quite fancy the 1940s. I like the trams and the trousers.
You can't please everyone, nor should you seek to, because then you won't please anyone, least of all yourself.
America is this incredible mosaic of immigrants, so people really want to be anchored in some kind of culture as well as the one they are living in.
I enjoy performing, always, but when you're taping a gig, you've got to blank out this mass apparatus of self-consciousness that's surrounding you, this invitation to drown in self-consciousness. Otherwise you just won't be able to do anything.
I've been writing since I was very young, even before I was a teenager. As far as I'm concerned, I am a writer - whether my writing's spoken or written in a blog, paper, book or printed on the side of a submarine.
I'm very drawn to Eastern Europe, so I like a Hungarian writer who wrote in French called Emil Cioran; he was always good for giving me such a stir.
I have no qualifications to do anything else and there weren't any formal application forms you had to fill in for stand-up, so I thought I'd give that a twist.
The East is very mysterious to Westerners. Even post-Cold War, it's still an unknown entity.
You can laugh at somebody because they are innocent, and because they are naive or they are about to walk into a wall, but if somebody's giving you stuff, if somebody's talking, giving you their take on things, what makes you laugh, generally speaking, is going to be somebody who is telling it in an angry way.
Maybe this is just me, but as time goes by, I'm more bewildered by modernity. It gets more unfathomable with every passing year.
The terror of failure can make you feel like a failure. So a bunch of people think you're not very good at your thing. How much do you invest in what they say? How much do you care? Failure is not putting yourself on the line.
We are both drawn to surreal situations so the writing was a joy.
I don't want to do the same thing over and over again.
In the same way, there is some creature gnawing away inside of me, urging me to do things in different ways.
