What I would really like to have been, given a perfect world, is a jazz pianist. I mean jazz. I don't mean rock and roll. I mean the never-the-same-twice music the American black people gave the world.

A nice thing about war-not that anything about war is nice, I guess-is that while it's going on and you're in it, you never worry about doing the right thing.

I am of course a skeptic about the divinity of Christ and a scorner of the notion that there is a God who cares how we are or what we do.

Incidentally, I am honorary president of the American Humanist Association, having succeeded the great science fiction writer and biochemist Dr. Isaac Asimov. John Updike, who is religious, says I talk more about God than any seminarian. Socialism is, in fact, a form of Christianity, people wishing to imitate Christ.

In 1844, Karl Marx said, "Religion is the opiate of the masses." He said this at a time when opium and opium derivatives were the only painkillers. And he said it helped a little. He might as well have said, "Religion is the aspirin of the people."

If people insist on living as if there's no tomorrow, there really won't be one.

The only difference between Hitler and Bush is that Hitler was elected.