Mark Leyner

“A person's name is a fate-conjuring incantation.”

“When I started, I wanted to be thought of as tortured and seductive, not funny, but humor tends to be a reflexive part of a person's sensibility. It's an almost impossible thing to teach anyone, which leads me to believe that it's intuitive.”

“One of the things about Ike that makes him so indisputably a hero is that he doesn't leave his own contradictions to the effete disputations of armchair scholars. He grapples with them himself, in his own lifetime.”

“I always thought of my work as being animated by a spirit of unhinged generosity.”

“'Et Tu, Babe' was born out of my absolute certainty that a writer's life was solitary and insular, and I was happy with that. I love reading and writing; it's my whole life.”

“I can tell from about 20 yards away when someone has a manuscript for me. I can just tell - they have that look.”

“As far as what I do, my value as a writer is certainly not to try to recapitulate a 19th century form. Certain styles of narrative don't conform to my style of experiencing the world.”

“My relationship with my readers is somewhat theatrical. One of the main things I try to do in my work is delight my readers.”

“Sometimes I think my purpose is as a saboteur when I'm working with other people, derailing what they're trying to do or taking things to a ludicrous extremity.”

“My work generally tends to be an all-out, 360-degree subversive take on everything, most of all my own notion of myself as a son, father, husband, human being and male in this culture.”

“I thought of myself as kind of an anarchist all my whole adult life, from the days when I was 15 or 16.”

“I tend to interpret that whole 'everyone's wife is a Mossad agent' thing in a more sort of metaphorical way--that people you're intimate with might be, like, 'double agents,' y'know? It's a weird kind of paranoia you get about people you love--that they might turn out to be completely different from who you think they are, that it's all been some sort of diabolically patient plot against you. I think that's a pretty normal fear you have in any serious relationship. And that's why it's such a popular part of the epic, because so many people can relate to that fear. But personally, I don't really worry about it too much.”

“So where does the name Adam's apple come from? Most people say that it is from the notion that this bump was caused by the forbidden fruit getting stuck in the throat of Adam in the Garden of Eden. There is a problem with this theory because some Hebrew scholars believe that the forbidden fruit was the pomegranate. The Koran claims that the forbidden fruit was a banana. So take your pick---Adam's apple, Adam's pomegranate, Adam's banana. Eve clearly chewed before swallowing.”

“The interesting thing about something in the back of your mind is that it can travel pretty far back in your mind.”

“People really want to believe that there is no fiction. I think they find it much easier to imagine that novelists are writing memoirs, writing about their lives, because it's difficult to conceive that there's a great imaginary life in which you can participate.”

“I don't walk around chuckling all the time. My outlook is very bleak. It's worse than bleak, it's apocalyptic.”

“I think to simply make fun of something isn't particularly interesting. I try to not just do a parody of something or belittle something or disparage something.”