Forty to 60 I would say is your prime. That's when you know the most, you've seen the most, you understand the most, and you still have some physical energy.

Once you start doing only what you've already proven you can do, you're on the road to death.

A lot of stuff I do out of pure obsessiveness.

I'm a big believer than a great bit is a great bit - if I go and see someone I love, like Robert Klein. I want to hear some classics and some new stuff. But a great stand-up bit takes a long time to really polish and perfect, and they're beautiful things when they're done.

I don't want to be too critical of what other people do, but when people go back to do the same thing that they did, I'm completely confused. I'm like, 'Didn't you make that movie already?' I've been very fortunate, and I'm well taken care of, so the least I can do is try to go forward.

Taking in a baseball game on TV is also a big treat.

When I was a comic in the 1980s, I was on the road somewhere every day, and I'd get back to the hotel, and it was Carson and Letterman, and I looked forward to that all day.

The Internet offers opportunities that are more unique than ever before. With TV, I know I'm making 22 minutes; I know there's a commercial in the middle. With the Internet, no one knows anything. No rules.

I prefer the old theaters because the audience is... trapped.

The truth is, I had always wanted to be a comedian, but I really didn't have that kind of personality, and it's a terrifying thing to say.

I think of myself more as a sportsman than I do an artist.

I have no interest in gender or race or anything like that. But everyone else is kind of, with their calculating - is this the exact right mix? I think that's - to me it's anti-comedy. It's more about PC-nonsense.

I think it's funny to be delicate with subjects that are explosive.

You can be passionate about anything.

I wrote an article on a new Porsche for 'Automobile Magazine.' I knew the editor, and she asked me to write this article. So I'm more proud of that than anything.

I like definitive things.

We sold 'Seinfeld' all over the world but it was a very specific kind of show. In some countries it went down really well, in others they hated it.

I can walk through a hotel lobby and watch people at the desk and see what they're doing. People don't look at me. They don't even know I'm there.

I do a little thing about the way people shake the sweetener packet. You know, like they're all excited. I want to get all the granules down to one end. I love all these rituals.

I do probably 60 concerts a year in the States. And I go out to clubs in the week. I'm doing new stuff all the time.

Forty is when you actually begin even deserving to be on stage telling people what you think.

It takes up enough of my time and interest just working on comedy. I just enjoy it and love doing it.

I don't need you to be funny. I don't want to be entertained.

You spend so much time in the world of virtual that the actual - which nothing is more actual than stand-up - it's a painful experience for the audience, and the comedian a lot of time - we miss that.

My family and I survived Hurricane Katrina in 2005; we left my grandmother's flooding house, were refused shelter by a white family, and took refuge in trucks in an open field during a Category Five hurricane. I saw an entire town demolished, people fighting over water, breaking open caskets searching for something that could help them survive.

There is power in naming racism for what it is, in shining a bright light on it, brighter than any torch or flashlight. A thing as simple as naming it allows us to root it out of the darkness and hushed conversation where it likes to breed like roaches. It makes us acknowledge it. Confront it.

Before Hurricane Katrina, I always felt like I could come back home. And home was a real place, and also it had this mythical weight for me. Because of the way that Hurricane Katrina ripped everything away, it cast that idea in doubt.

While I've said that there are plenty of things I dislike about the South, I can be clear that there are things I love about the South.

I celebrate my blackness. I love the artistic vibrancy of the culture I was born to.

I try to treat writing as part of my daily routine: I write for at least two hours, five days per week. I tend to write at home, in a room I've set aside for the task. I don't work well in cafes or busy, loud spaces, although I wish I could. It would mean greater flexibility for me.

When I look back on my reading habits when I was really young, I was really drawn to stories about strong girls who in some ways are outsiders.

In the South, there is more overt racism. It's more willfully ignorant and brazen. But it's not as if by moving I'm going to be able to escape institutionalized racism. It's not as though my life won't be twisted and impacted by racism anymore. It will.

There was something so empowering about having President Obama in office because I know that for many of us, that's something that we never thought that we'd see in our lifetime.

People give the South a bad rap. It's often stereotyped as backwards and close-minded and dogmatic, and all of those things have been true. But I think that the South is changing, slowly but surely.

I don't really base any of my characters on specific people that I know, although my characters are informed by the kind of people who live in my community.

When I was a teenager, I was the only black girl at a small, private Episcopal school, where my tuition was paid by the family my mother worked for. It was hard being the only one, and I faced a fair amount of racist and classist bullying there.

I've heard some writers say that they are obsessed with certain ideas and that they find themselves writing around the same obsession again and again, but telling different stories to get at that same idea. I'm beginning to think that I suffer from this syndrome, too.

I would encounter W. E. B. Du Bois and the term double consciousness. When I read it, I thought about sitting in my mother's employer's family room, watching my mother clean while I waited for her to finish so we could go home.

I'm always thinking about time. That's one of themes I return to in my work, the way the past bears on the present, the way that time is not linear, and how that expresses itself in people's everyday lives.

I read everything. When I say everything, I read everything: children's literature, Y.A., science fiction, fantasy, romance - I read it all. Each genre fulfills a different need I have. Each book teaches me something.

I'm a failed poet. Reading poetry helps me to see the world differently, and I try to infuse my prose with figurative language, which goes against the trend in fiction.

'The UnAmericans' is a compassionate and brilliantly rendered debut - and for a book set largely in the past, these stories feel essential to understanding the contemporary world in which we live.

'As I Lay Dying,' I reread that often. That's the first work of Faulkner's that I read that so amazed me and that I responded to emotionally and viscerally. I admired it so much, and I think that's why I keep rereading it.

People are not afraid to be activists, to be vocal. And I think back to my years in college, and that wasn't the case.

My mom worked as a housekeeper, and I saw her relationship with her employers - how on the one hand she spent more time with these women than with a lot of her friends, and how in certain ways they were friends. But then they weren't.

That larger story in 'Salvage the Bones' is just about survival, and I think that, in the end, there are things about this novel and about these characters' experiences that make their stories universal stories.

Sometimes, you get tired of fighting. I think you just sort of come to this realization that yes, that you will get tired, but that doesn't mean that you can give up the fight.

Katrina silenced me for two years. I wrote a 12-page essay on my experience in Katrina, and that's it. I didn't write anything for, like, two, two and a half years after Katrina hit because it was so traumatic.

I need the lightness of children's lit.

Throughout my career, when I have been rejected, there was sometimes subtext, and it was this: People will not read your work because these are not universal stories.