I met Lee Harvey Oswald, in Moscow just after he defected. One night I was having dinner with a friend, an Italian newspaper cor­respondent, and when he came by to pick me up he asked me if I'd mind going with him first to talk to a young American defector, one Lee Harvey Oswald. Oswald was staying at the Metropole, an old Czarist hotel just off Kremlin Square.

It's a very excruciating life facing that blank piece of paper every day and having to reach up somewhere into the clouds and bring something down out of them.

You don't understand. You've never hated anybody. No, I never have. We're allotted just so much time on earth, and I wouldn't want the Lord to see me wasting mine in any such manner.

It takes a lot of bad writing to get to a little good writing.

Life is difficult enough without Meryl Streep movies.

Those fellows, they're always crying over killers. Never a thought for the victims.

Clocks indeed must have their sacrifice: what is death but an offering to time and eternity?