I do not admire 'the people,' as such. No one really does. Their folk wisdom is usually false, their instincts predatory. Even their sense of survival - so highly developed in the individual - goes berserk in the mass. A crowd is a fool.

The last best hope of earth, two trillion dollars in debt, is spinning out of control, and all we can do is stare at a flickering cathode-ray tube as Ollie answers questions on TV while the press, resolutely irrelevant as ever, asks politicians if they have committed adultery. From V-J Day 1945 to this has been, my fellow countrymen, a perfect nightmare.

Perfect love sometimes does not come until the first grandchild.

The ideal to which John Adams subscribed-that we would be a nation of laws, not of men-was quickly subverted when the churches forced upon everyone, through supposedly neutral and just laws, their innumerable taboos on sex, alcohol, gambling. We are now indeed a nation of laws, mostly bad and certainly antihuman.

Before the word gay had really been invented, was there's no such thing. Only a country, basically as mindless about these matters - based upon our peasant superstitions, religious superstitions - would they make categories. Everybody's everything.

A superficial education would be worse than none. But a full education would open every man's eyes to the nature of human existence.

I came out of Capitol Hill. Well, that's just not an ordinary background for a writer of the ordinary American sort.