I listened to radio comedians who were brilliant during the thirties and found out that what made them so damn funny was how their jokes were timed.
"This has slowed me down as a writer, because I can only write jokes. Jokes are efficient things and they must be as carefully constructed as mouse traps. And so for me to write a page of a novel is a very slow business, because the whole thing has to be rigged in order to snap at the end. My books are essentially mosaics, thousands and thousands of tiny little chips all glued together, and each chip is this thing I learned to do--this thing I learned to make as a child--which is a little joke."5
The 1929 Depression greatly affected the family fortune. "My mother thought she might make a new fortune by writing for the slick magazines. She took short story courses at night. She studied magazines the way gamblers study racing forms.
"And my father painted pictures in a studio he'd set up on the top floor of the house. There wasn't much work for architects during the Great Depression--not much work for anybody.
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