You lived and died alone, especially in fighters. Fighters. Somehow, despite everything, that word had not become sterile. You slipped into the hollow cockpit and strapped and plugged yourself into the machine. The canopy ground shut and sealed you off. Your oxygen, your very breath, you carried into the chilled vacuum, in a steel bottle.

We were moderate, we will never know what it is to spill out our lives.

Lots of scripts are written and not made, even scripts that people want to make.

It's just that it's hard to believe in greatness.

But that isn't my life. I have said many times I don't want to be considered one who once flew fighters. That's not who I am. I devoted the subsequent 50 years - more - to writing.

Certain things I remember exactly as they were. They are merely discolored a bit by time, like coins in the pocket of a forgotten suit. Most of the details, though, have long since been transformed or rearranged to bring others of them forward. Some, in fact, are obviously counterfeit; they are no less important. One alters the past to form the future.

One alters the past to form the future but there is a real significance to the pattern which finally appears, which resists all further change.