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.

The polls demonstrate that 50 percent of Americans who get their news from TV think Saddam Hussein was behind the Twin Towers attack. Man, have they got ways for getting half-truths out right away now, thanks to TV! I think TV is a calamity in a democracy.

The world is too serious. To get mad at a work of art-because maybe somebody, somewhere is blowing his stack over what I've done-is like getting mad at a hot fudge sundae.

Much of the blame is the malarkey that artists have created to glorify war, which as we all know, is nonsense, and a good deal worse than that — romantic pictures of battle, and of the dead and men in uniform and all that. And I did not want to have that story told again.

I have been a soreheaded occupant of a file drawer labeled "Science Fiction" ... and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal.

That was what made them so hilarious and unafraid. That was the strength of the Nazis. [...] They understood God better than anyone. They knew how to make Him stay away.

It was very exciting for her, taking his dignity away in the name of love.