Tolerance is really a better thing than understanding. Because it doesn't agitate against human nature.

I've always been old at heart.

There is one thing that has disappeared, not just from the U.S. but from the entire world, is the idea of ever being embarrassed by anything.

There is no such thing as inner peace. There is only nervousness or death. Any attempt to prove otherwise constitutes unacceptable behavior.

What's the point of being young if you're not going to make new things, I wonder?

...I believed passionately that Communists were a race of horned men who divided their time equally between the burning of Nancy Drew books and the devising of a plan of nuclear attack that would land the largest and most lethal bomb squarely upon the third-grade class of Thomas Jefferson School in Morristown, New Jersey.

New York's not exactly antiseptic. It could be clean and less dangerous, and not horrible, not under a tidal wave of tourists.