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.

In America few people will trust you unless you are irreverent.

A modern democracy is a tyranny whose borders are undefined; one discovers how far one can go only by traveling in a straight line until one is stopped.

Writing can wreck your body. You sit there on the chair hour after hour and sweat your guts out to get a few words.

Psychoanalysis and Zen, in my private psychic geometry, are equal to nicotine. They are anti-existential. Nicotine quarantines one out of existence.

I think it's bad to talk about one's present work, for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension.

The private terror of the liberal spirit is invariably suicide, not murder.