If you were to put a few of those Tex Avery cartoons, a couple Picasso and Pollack paintings and fold in a few passages from Sam Beckett, Jean-Paul Sartre and Jonathan Winters into a blender and grind the bejesus out of 'em, you would have Steve Martin's Cruel Shoes. As a writer this book definitely influenced me and I recently purchased it again because I lost my original copy; it has stayed with me all these years. I first read it when I was 13 or 14. Now that I'm not even close to that age, I can honestly say, without a shadow of a doubt, that I get the same enjoyment and pleasure out of reading it today as I did oh-so-many-years-ago. This book is cheeky, irreverent, thoughtful, giggly, confounding (in a good way), and it plays with language and ideas in such a way that it causes one to pause and reflect the way the Bible causes one to pause and reflect. Steve Martin has written a book for people who still believe that silliness and intellect can not only walk hand-in-hand, but can fall in madly love and live happily, beautifully and absurdly ever after.