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How often do you laugh while you're writing?

It's not too often. It might happen twice a year. But I like it when it happens. It happened a few weeks ago when I was writing something and I wound up not using it. I guess I just surprised myself. In real life I find lots of things funny, but I laugh when they happen. And then when I write them down I don't laugh because I've already laughed.

Your writing is very eccentric. Can you identify influences on your writing style?

I'm more influenced by things that I hear than things that I read. There's an English guy named Alan Bennett who's a national treasure in England [where Sedaris now lives]. He has a lot of things on the BBC. Whenever I listen to anything of his on tape, his voice gets in my head and I just have to realize that for the next three weeks, everything I write is going to be third-rate Alan Bennett.

Last year I was reading a lot of Patricia Highsmith stories. I'm not a mystery person at all but there's something in her sort of old-fashioned sense of description that affected a couple stories in [my latest] book. There's a story in [my] book about going to the Apple Pan in Los Angeles. The description of the men, the description of the counter, that was all Patricia Highsmith. I wouldn't have written it that way or been that descriptive if I hadn't listened to her.

Or Ira. I was listening to This American Life and Davy Rothbart did a story about going with his mom, who was deaf, to someplace in Brazil so she could be healed by a faith-healer. I think it was the best thing Ira's ever had on his show. That's the kind of thing you listen to and then you think, I'm going to do something, I don't know what it is, but I want to do something that could possibly move people the way that that did. I think that's partly why you read: to feel that things are possible. I don't mean in a jealous way, like I want to do something even better, but just to think for one moment that you could affect people and to realize, Well, gee, I have the opportunity.

From the Los Angeles Times:

ROSETTENVILLE, South Africa - When apartheid ended a decade ago, this was a tidy, all-white suburb of 20,000 squeezed between the sprawling black township of Soweto and the economic engine of white rule, Johannesburg. But the residents who converged on a local school to vote in elections [last month] reflected, like so much of South Africa, a nation transformed. Now a teeming suburb of 50,000, Rosettenville is a racial melange. Thousands have moved here from Soweto and other black and mixed-race townships, often buying homes from departing whites. Joining them have been Nigerians, Zimbabweans and Mozambicans, lured by the post-apartheid detente with the rest of Africa. … Whites and blacks live side by side here in equal numbers and relative harmony. But crime has escalated, housing prices have sunk, schools are overcrowded … and joblessness shadows the streets of modest homes.

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