Computers: he always fixed on computers when his mind wandered into the future--instruments he revered and hated. The computer world was a place where snotty kids knew everything and nothing.... The computer was part of a future cloudy, unpredictable and menacing.

Since I believe that a person's philosophical point of view has little meaning if it is not matched by being and action, I found myself willingly wed to an endless series of unpopular causes, experiences which I feel enriched my writing as much as they depleted other aspects of my life.

A critic is a eunuch working in a harem. He watches it, but he knows he can't do it. Critics very often are failed writers and, like failed priests, they hate religion.

To be dogmatic about a cause you believe in at the age of 20 or 30 is not unusual. But to be dogmatic at age 55 or 60 shows a lack of any learning capacity.

I'm disenchanted with Communism and most other things. I'm cynical but not a cynic. I'm cynical about TV, Congress, and commercial peanut butter.

I was part of a generation that believed in socialism and finally found that belief corroded and destroyed. That is not renouncing Communism or socialism. It's reaching a certain degree of enlightenment about what the Soviet Union practices.