At one time I used to keep notebooks with outlines for stories. But I found doing this somehow deadened the idea in my imagination. If the notion is good enough, if it truly belongs to you, then you can't forget it-it will haunt you till it's written.

I never had a rejection slip in my life.

Still, when all is said, somewhere one must belong: even the soaring falcon returns to its master's wrist.

I think to be a good teacher you need an enormous amount of patience and I'm a very impatient person.

As long as you live, there's always something waiting; and even if it's bad, and you know it's bad, what can you do? You can't stop living.

Every day is a new day with me. All holds are off. All contracts are forgotten.

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.