It's not a good idea to put your wife into a novel; not your latest wife anyway.

While I'm working on a book, I rarely read anything more than The New York Times. Which may have the long-term effect of flattening my style.

I no longer gave a sick dog's drop for the wisdom, the reliability and the authority of the public's literary mind, those creeps and old ladies of vested reviewing.

Since great writers communicate a vision of existence, one can't borrow their methods. The method is married to the vision.

Any workout which does not involve a certain minimum of danger or responsibility does not improve the body - it just wears it out.

Growth, in some curious way, I suspect, depends on being always in motion just a little bit, one way or another.

Indeed the early history of rocket design could be read as the simple desire to get the rocket to function long enough to give an opportunity to discover where the failure occurred. Most early debacles were so benighted that rocket engineers could have been forgiven for daubing the blood of a virgin goat on the orifice of the firing chamber.