The waitress brought me another drink. She wanted to light my hurricane lamp again. I wouldn't let her. "Can you see anything in the dark, with your sunglasses on?" she asked me. "The big show is inside my head," I said.

My special situation was that I was the son and grandson of architects. And so I saw building. We were building the city, and that was exciting.

You had to get everything exactly right or the editors would give you hell.

It is always pitiful when any human being falls into a condition hardly more respectable than that of an animal. How much more pitiful it is when the person who falls has had all the advantages!

What everybody is well advised to do is to not write about your own life, this is if you want to write fast. You will be writing about your own life anyway but you won't know it.

I believe that reading and writing are the most nourishing forms of meditation anyone has so far found. By reading the writings of the most interesting minds in history, we meditate with our own minds and theirs as well. This to me is a miracle.

I was a student in the Department of Anthropology. At that time, they were teaching that there was absolutely no difference between anybody. They may be teaching that still.