I feel that if a person has problems communicating the very least he can do is to shut up.

Well, you ask a silly question, and you get a silly answer.

You can raise welts like nobody else, as we dance to the Masochism Tango.

Alas, irreverence has been subsumed by mere grossness, at least in the so-called mass media. What we have now - to quote myself at my most pretentious - is a nimiety of scurrility with a concomitant exiguity of taste.

But in the new (math) approach, the important thing is to understand what you're doing, rather than to get the right answer.

The audience usually has to be with you, I'm afraid. I always regarded myself as not even preaching to the converted, I was titillating the converted.

The civil liberties types who are fighting this issue have to fight it, owing to the nature of the laws, as a matter of freedom of speech and stifling of free expression and so on. But we know what's really involved, dirty books are fun. That's all there is to it. But you can't get up in a court and say that.