Sometimes I wonder if he wasn't born dead. I never met a man who was less interested in the living. Sometimes I think that's the trouble with the world: too many people in high places who are stone-cold dead.

I keep losing and regaining my equilibrium, which is the basic plot of all popular fiction. And I myself am a work of fiction.

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.

The champagne was dead. So it goes.

Just in the nick of time they realized that it was their own habitat they were wrecking -- that they weren't merely visitors.

The artist makes his living by pretending, by putting it in a meaningful hole though no such holes exist.

Humor is a way of holding off how awful life can be, to protect yourself.