Dear Mother, I meant to write you before this and I hope you haven't been worried.... I have met some Beautiful People and...

And - of course! - the Non-people. The whole freaking world was full of people who were bound to tell you they weren't qualified to do this or that but they were determined to go ahead and do just that thing anyway.

Driving a stock car does not require much handling ability, at least not as compared to Grand Prix racing, because the tracks are simple banked ovals and there is almost no shifting of gears. So, qualifying becomes a test of raw nerve - of how fast a man is willing to take a curve.

The attitude is we live and let live. This is actually an amazing change in values in a rather short time and it's an example of freedom from religion.

I do novels a bit backward. I look for a situation, a milieu first, and then I wait to see who walks into it.

The first newspaper I worked on was the 'Springfield Union' in Springfield, Massachusetts. I wrote over a hundred letters to newspapers asking for work and got three responses, two no's.

On Wall Street he and a few others - how many? three hundred, four hundred, five hundred? had become precisely that... Masters of the Universe.