Quoth Zadie Smith:

"The funniest thing about dying is how much we, the living, ask of the dying; how much we beg them to make it easy on us."

"We had been tight as thieves as children, but I'd barely seen him since [my father] died, and I sensed us settling into the attenuated relations of adult siblings, a new formal distance, always slightly abashed, for there seems no clear way, in adult life, to do justice to the intimacy of childhood. I remember being scandalized, as a child, at how rarely our parents spoke to their siblings. How was it possible? How did it happen? Then it happens to you."

"Comedy nausea is the extreme incarnation of what my father felt: not only is joke-telling a cheap art; the whole business of standup is, in some sense, a shameful cheat. For a comedian of this kind, I imagine it feels like a love affair gone wrong. You start out wanting people to laugh in exactly the places you mean them to laugh, then they always laugh where you want them to laugh -- then you start to hate them for it."

-The New Yorker, Dec. 22, 2008