Once I had all the facts in, I found I didn't have the immoral courage to pull the caper. So I wrote it as a story. As a teenager, I didn't have any skills for writing as such, so it came out in 1500 words.

Ninety percent of everything is crap.

The story of my very first sale is the fact that I dreamed up a foolproof paper to cheat an insurance company out of several hundred thousand dollars.

There is in certain living souls a quality of loneliness unspeakable, so great it must be shared as company is shared by lesser beings. Such a loneliness is mine; so know by this that in immensity there is one lonelier than you.

As far as hypnosis is concerned, I had a very serious problem when I was in my twenties. I encountered a man who later became the president of the American Society of Medical Hypnosis. He couldn't hypnotize me.

Fear is a survival instinct; fear in its way is a comfort for it means that somewhere hope is alive.

The movers and shakers have always been obsessive nuts.