I wanted to be a politician and a movie star. But I was born a writer. If you're born that, you can't change it. You're going to do it whether you want to or not.~

Never offend an enemy in a small way.

It is marvelous indeed to watch on television the rings of Saturn close; and to speculate on what we may yet find at galaxy's edge. But in the process, we have lost the human element; not to mention the high hope of those quaint days when flight would create one world. Instead of one world, we have star wars, and a future in which dumb dented human toys will drift mindlessly about the cosmos long after our small planet's dead.

I can understand companionship. I can understand bought sex in the afternoon, but I cannot understand the love affair.

Nothing human is finally calculable; even to ourselves we are strange.

When you come from a family that has been political, and I was brought up by my grandfather in the Senate, my father was in Roosevelt's Cabinet, this is not the class that produces writers or reflective people.

We affect one another quite enough merely by existing. Whenever the stars cross, or is it comets? fragments pass briefly from one orbit to another. On rare occasions there is total collision, but most often the two simply continue without incident, neither losing more than a particle to the other, in passing.