A chaplain's assistant is customarily a figure of fun in the american army.
I hope to build a reputation as a science-fiction writer. That's the pitch. We'll see.
My cash cows, the slick magazines, were put out of business by TV.
I'm screamingly funny, you know, I really am in the books. And that helps because I'm funnier than a lot of people, I think, and that's appreciated by young people.
That is how you get to be a writer, incidentally: you feel somehow marginal, somehow slightly off-balance all the time.
I really wonder what gives us the right to wreck this poor planet of ours.
We could have saved the earth but we were too damned cheap.
I was taught that the human brain was the crowning glory of evolution so far, but I think it's a very poor scheme for survival.
This country is being managed to death, being public related to death.
I left the middle west for schenectady because the general electric company offered me a more congenial, better paying job than did anyone else.
I am from a family of artists. Here I am, making a living in the arts. It has not been a rebellion. It's as though I had taken over the family ESSO station.
People don't come to church for preachments, of course, but to daydream about god.
Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.
People need good lies. There are too many bad ones.
What should young people do with their lives today? many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.
Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before.
The feeling about a soldier is, when all is said and done, he wasn't really going to do very much with his life anyway. The example usually is: he wasn't going to compose beethoven's fifth.
People aren't supposed to look back. I'm certainly not going to do it anymore.
True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.
As a humanist, I love science. I hate superstition, which could never have given us a-bombs.
I tell you, we are here on earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different.
Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why.
The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake.
The universe is a big place, perhaps the biggest.