"Back in the East you can't do much without the right papers, but with the right papers you can do anything The believe in papers. Papers are power."

"Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art."

"I don't act, I don't direct, I don't design."

"I was interested by the idea that artists working in a totalitarian dictatorship or tsarist autocracy are secretly and slightly shamefully envied by artists who work in freedom. They have the gratification of intense interest: the authorities want to put them in jail, while there are younger readers for whom what they write is pure oxygen."

"I think I am done with Wikipedia for the time being. But I have a secret hope. Someone recently proposed a Wikimorgue - a bin of broken dreams where all rejects could still be read, as long as they weren't libelous or otherwise illegal."

"Getting out of the hospital is a lot like resigning from a book club. You're not out of it until the computer says you're out of it."

"We are now integrated into American society and I don't like the word fashionable, because fashionable means that it's going to pass. It's not like that anymore."

"It used to be that you had to make female TV characters perfect so no one would be offended by your 'portrayal' of women. Even when I started out on 'The Office' eight years ago, we could write our male characters funny and flawed, but not the women. And now, thankfully, it's completely different."