True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.

Why were so many Americans treated by their government as though their lives were as disposable as facial tissues? Because that was the way authors customarily treated bit-part players in their made-up tales.

[I write] intuitively, reflexively, as if skiing down a steep mountain slope with no time to think.

It's the writer's job to stage confrontations, so the characters will say surprising and revealing things, and educate and entertain us all.

The Earthlings behaved at all times as though there were a big eye in the sky—as though that big eye were ravenous for entertainment.

Human beings are chimpanzees who get crazy drunk on power. By saying that our leaders are power-drunk chimpanzees, am I in danger of wrecking the morale of our soldiers fighting and dying in the Middle East? Their morale, like so many bodies, is already shot to pieces. They are being treated, as I never was, like toys a rich kid got for Christmas.

My ancestors were Freethinkers - and that's what I am, except we're called secular humanists now.