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.

If God is all good, then He is not all powerful. If God is all powerful, then He is not all good. I am a disbeliever is the omnipotence of God because of the Holocaust. But for 35 years, I have been believing that He is doing the best he can.

Writer’s block is only a failure of the ego.

I had the idea that there were two worlds. There was a real world as I called it, a world of wars and boxing clubs and children'shomes on back streets, and this real world was a world where orphans burned orphans.... I liked the other world in which almost everyone lived. The imaginary world.

I don't think life is absurd. I think we are all here for a huge purpose. I think we shrink from the immensity of the purpose we are here for.

The natural role of twentieth-century man is anxiety.

Writing for a newspaper is like running a revolutionary war. You go to battle not when you are ready, but when action offers itself.