I am an atheist (or at best a Unitarian who winds up in church quite a lot).

You know who was a hero? Franklin Roosevelt.

I can have oodles of charm when I want to.

A lover's a liar, To himself he lies, The truthful are loveless, Like oysters their eyes!

And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.

This is what i find most encouraging about the writing trades: they allow mediocre people who are patient and industrious to revise their stupidity, to edit themselves into something like intelligence. They also allow lunatics to seem saner than sane.

I'm an old guy, and I was protesting during the Vietnam War. We killed fifty Asians for every loyal American. Every artist worth a damn in this country was terribly opposed to that war, finally, when it became evident what a fiasco and meaningless butchery it was.