The most sheer fun I ever had in sports was playing volleyball, a game I commend highly. I understand that an effort is under way to establish a national league of professional volleyball teams, and if you have ever seen the great women's teams of Japan and Russia or the equally good men's teams of Cuba and East Germany, you know how exciting this playground game, which requires so little equipment, can be.

If a young aspirant had a modicum of skill and a busy typewriter she or he would sooner or later get a foothold in one of the magazines and a leaping start on the ladder upward.

No invader has ever conquered the heart of Poland, that spirit which is the inheritance of sons and daughters, the private passion of families and the ancient, unbreakable tie to all those who came before.

I thought that perhaps the most creative mix for a society would be nine parts solid worker from institutions like MIT to one part poet from Marrakech, but in spite of the fact that I myself had been trained to be one of the solid workers, which meant that all of my sympathies lay with that group, I would not surrender the poet. The problem was to find him.

I feel myself the inheritor of a great background of people. Just who, precisely, they were, I have never known. I might be part Negro, might be part Jew, part Muslim, part Irish. So I can't afford to be supercilious about any group of people because I may be that people.

It is difficult to be king when the gods are changing.

You don't fight to protect warships or old men. Like the book says, you fight to save your civilization. And so often it seems that civilization is composed mainly of the things women and children want.