The difficulty with humorists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don’t—whichever seems likelier to win an effect.

Momentarily drained of lust, he stares at the remembered contortions to which it has driven him. His life seems a sequence of grotesque poses assumed to no purpose, a magic dance empty of belief. There is no God; Janice can die: the two thoughts come at once, in one slow wave. He feels underwater, caught in chains of transparent slime, ghosts of the urgent ejaculations he has spat into the mild bodies of women. His fingers on his knees pick at persistent threads.

If I get big laughs, I'm a comedian. If I get little laughs, I'm a humorist. If I get no laughs, I'm a singer.

The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.

When you aren't sincere you need to pretend, and by pretending you end up believing yourself; that's the basic principle of every faith.

If she’d been born at the right time they would have burned her over in Salem.