For most people, self-awareness and self-pity blossom simultaneously in early adolescence. It's about that time that we start viewing the world as something other than a whoop-de-doo playground, we start to experience personally how threatening it can be, how cruel and unjust. At the very moment when we become, for the first time, both introspective and socially conscientious, we receive the bad news that the world, by and large, doesn't give a rat's ass.

Our greatest human adventure is the evolution of consciousness. We are in this life to enlarge the soul, liberate the spirit, and light up the brain.

I had literary interests my whole life. I decided at the age of five I was going to be a writer. So I had done a great deal of reading. I suppose I was more at home in Greenwich Village than, say, any of classmates from Warsaw High School. But in any case, it was an overwhelming experience for me. It took me some time to begin to assimilate it.

At the typewriter you find out who you are.

Just because something didn't happen doesn't mean it isn't true.

The truth, from my perspective, is that the world, indeed, is ending - and is also being reborn. It's been doing that all day, every day, forever.

As expected, you get his machine. Someday, even the "call of nature" will be answered by a machine.