I think the pattern of my essays is A funny thing happened to me on my way through Finnegans Wake.

Hemingway seems to be in a funny position. People nowadays can't identify with him closely as a member of their own generation and he isn't yet historical.

I have only been funny about seventy four per cent of the time. Yes I think that is right. Seventy-four per cent of the time.

I've thought for the last decade or so the only actual place raw truth was seeping through in newspapers was on the Comics Pages. They were able to pull off intelligent social comment pure truths not found elsewhere in the news pages and had the ability to make it all funny entertaining and pertinent.

I love readings and my readers but the din of voices of the audience gives me stage fright and the din of voices inside whisper that I am a fraud and that the jig is up. Surely someone will rise up from the audience and say out loud that not only am I not funny and helpful but I'm annoying and a phony.

Actually I never did stand up. I'm not that funny.

Sometimes I think what I write is funny in its quiet way.

When I was a little kid I wrote this play about all these characters living in a haunted house. There was a witch who lived there and a mummy. When they were all hassling him this guy who bought the house - I can't believe I remember this - he said to them 'Who's paying the mortgage on this haunted house?' I thought that was really funny.

I actually think of being funny as an odd turn of mind like a mild disability some weird way of looking at the world that you can't get rid of.

The funny thing is I'm not bothered or sad about being on my own - after all I've never had a husband.

I don't like comedy. I like funny things. I don't like comedy. Like comedy movies are just 'Oh Jesus.'

Don't remember me as too nice or beautiful or funny because then you'll be disappointed.

Life was a funny thing that happened to me on the way to the grave.

I had the classic 40 meltdown. I did. It's embarrassing. It was pretty funny. But then I recovered. To me it was like a second adolescence. Hormonally my body was changing my mind was changing and so my relationship to myself and the world around me came to this assault of finiteness.

Very often I don't make it through moments of recording because it is genuinely funny and absolutely ridiculous that a 60-year-old grown man is making these noises.

There's also a certain rhythm to the way Jews talk that might be funny.

You have to discover when you're inadequate to be funny and you don't know you're inadequate when you're a kid.