What we will be seeking... for the rest of our lives will be large, stable communities of like-minded people, which is to say relatives. They no longer exist. The lack of them is not only the main cause, but probably the only cause of our shapeless discontent in the midst of such prosperity.

Nobody will stop you from creating. Do it tonight. Do it tomorrow. That is the way to make your soul grow.

The computer revolution has allowed white-collar criminals to do what the Mob would have loved to do - put a pawnshop and a loan shark in every home!

So I went to New York City to be born again. It was and remains easy for most Americans to go somewhere else and start anew. I wasn't like my parents. I didn't have any supposedly sacred piece of land or shoals of friends to leave behind. Nowhere has the number zero been of more philisophical value than in the United States.... and when the [train] plunged into a tunnel under New York City, with it's lining of pipes and wires, I was out of the womb and into the birth canal.

Let there be nothing harmonious about our children's playthings, lest they grow up expecting peace and order, and be eaten alive.

Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

Big, undreamed-of things — the people on the edge see them first.