I started to write in about 1950; I was thirty-five at the time; there didn't seem to be any strong motivation. I simply was endeavoring to put down in a more or less straightforward journalistic style something about my experiences with addiction and addicts.

I'm no more or less antisocial than the next person.

My experience as an addict was very useful to me as writer: the whole syndrome of addiction and withdrawal and the extensions of that and other forms of addiction. It gave me a great deal of material. A writer can profit by something that someone else may not be able to profit from at all. Yet they were very disagreeable experiences. Very boring experiences.

Fortunately during my career I have won more or less everything, so I need to enjoy it to have the right motivation.

The world's major metropolitan cities are more or less the same.

One of the great debates about the Internet is whether it is making people more or less free.