All I can do is play the game the way the cards fall.

We risk great peril if we kill off this spirit of adventure, for we cannot predict how and in what seemingly unrelated fields it will manifest itself. A nation that loses its forward thrust is in danger, and one of the most effective ways to retain that thrust is to keep exploring possibilities. The sense of exploration is intimately bound up with human resolve, and for a nation to believe that it is still committed to a forward motion is to ensure its continuance.

You write that first draft really to see how it's going to come out.

There are no insoluble problems. Only time-consuming ones.

A nation becomes what its young people read in their youth. Its ideals are fashioned then, its goals strongly determined.

The really great writers are people like Emily Brontë who sit in a room and write out of their limited experience and unlimited imagination.

I write at eighty-five for the same reasons that impelled me to write at forty-five; I was born with a passionate desire to communicate, to organize experience, to tell tales that dramatize the adventures which readers might have had. I have been that ancient man who sat by the campfire at night and regaled the hunters with imaginative recitations about their prowess. The job of an apple tree is to bear apples. The job of a storyteller is to tell stories, and I have concentrated on that obligation.