One of [ways being lucky] was to go to school during the Great Depression because teaching became a plum job.

I'm a doctor of cowshit, pigshit, and chickenshit.....when you doctors figure out what you want, you'll find me out in the barn shoveling my thesis.

Nothing in this book is true.

Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?

The trouble with being a secular humanist is that we don't have a congregation. We don't meet so it's a very flimsy tribe, but there's a wonderful quotation from Nietzsche. Nietzsche said, Only a person of deep faith can afford the luxury of skepticism. Something perfectly is going on. I do not doubt it, but the explanations I hear do not satisfy me.

there i was in late middle age, cut loose in a thoroughly looted, bankrupt nation whose assets had been sold off to foreigners, a nation swamped by unchecked plagues and superstition and illiteracy and hypnotic tv, with virtually no health services for the poor. where to go? what to do?

You were sick, but now you're well again, and there's work to do.