There's something about American writing that's always been very important to me. First and foremost to entertain. But what I mean by entertainment is really the affecting of the emotions in some way. Making people laugh, that to me is something that has always been amiss in literary fiction, that making people laugh is regarded as somehow not an important job. I think it is.
Some comic writers tend to be put into a sort of ghetto.
There's a lot of comic writing that deserves to be put in a ghetto. With a lot of comic writing, the characters are cartoonish. I want my characters to be real, and I also want the reader to get moved in the second half of a book, when the plot has gained momentum. My books are getting more serious, but I'm trying for extremes on both sides. I'm going to co-write a screenplay with Emma Thompson.