Mark Leyner

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.