So many people in this country have a dual loyalty. They have loyalty to America, but they also are determined to have their parade up Fifth Avenue once a year... a Cuban parade or a Puerto Rican parade - many other countries. So they really don't forget.

I never forget. I never forgive. I can wait. I find it very easy to harbor a grudge. I have scores to settle.

[Aldous Huxley] compared the brain to a 'reducing valve'. In ordinary perception, the senses send an overwhelming flood of information to the brain, which the brain then filters down to a trickle it can manage for the purpose of survival in a highly competitive world. Man has become so rational, so utilitarian, that the trickle becomes most pale and thin. It is efficient, for mere survival, but it screens out the most wondrous part of man's potential experience without his even knowing it. We're shut off from our own world.

His hair has the long jesuschrist look. He is wearing the costume clothes. But most of all, he now has a very tolerant and therefore withering attitude toward all those who are still struggling in the old activist political ways...while he, with the help of psychedelic chemicals, is exploring the infinite regions of human consciousness.

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.

God, newspapers have been making up stories forever. This kind of trifling and fooling around is not a function of the New Journalism.

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