It's like the smarter you are, the more things can scare you.

I guess real maturity, which most of us never achieve, is when you realize that you're not the center of the universe.

It is not enough to simply teach children to read; we have to give them something worth reading.

That was the rule that you never mixed up troubles at home with life at school. When parents were poor or ignorant or mean, or even just didn't believe in having a TV set, it was up to their kids to protect them.

All of us can think of a book... that we hope none of our children or any other children have taken off the shelf. But if I have the right to remove that book from the shelf - that work I abhor - then you also have exactly the same right and so does everyone else. And then we have no books left on the shelf for any of us.

What I really want to do is to write a hilarious farce.

One thing living in Japan did for me was to make me feel that what is left out of a work of art is as important as, if not more important than, what is put in.