She upset Billy simply by being his mother. She made him feel embarrassed and ungrateful and weak because she had gone to so much trouble to give him life, and to keep that life going, and Billy didn't really like life at all.

This is a nation tragedy, of course - that we've changed from a society to an audience.

There are lots of things worth doing that are no way to make a living. They are agreeable ways to make a more agreeable life.

Vietnam was a country where America was trying to make people stop being communists by dropping things on them from airplanes.

What had made me move through so many dead and pointless years was curiosity.

You can't help it but you were born without a heart. At least you tried to believe what the people with hearts believed — so you were a good man just the same.

Well, there was stuff going on, heroic events. One was what used to be, and probably still is, the largest moving project in history. The headquarters of the Bell Telephone Company used to be brick. What they did was take the old brick building - with the operators in there saying, "Number please" and all that - and they put it through a quarter of a turn and moved it half a block!