Like so many named places in California it was less an identifiable city than a grouping of concepts--census tracts, special purpose bond-issue districts, shopping nuclei, all overlaid with access roads to its own freeway.

Why should things be easy to understand?

If there is something comforting - religious, if you want - about paranoia, there is still also anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long.

Life's single lesson: that there is more accident to it than a man can ever admit to in a lifetime and stay sane.

Someday it'll all be done by machine. Information machines.

It is simply wrong to begin with a theme, symbol or other abstract unifying agent, and then try to force characters and events to conform to it.

Let me be unambiguous. I prefer not to be photographed.