By the time I received my doctorate in American studies in 1957, I was in the twisted grip of a disease of our times in which the sufferer experiences an overwhelming urge to join the ‘real world.’ So I started working for newspapers.
I think of evolution as a myth, like the Norse myths, the Greek myths – anybody’s myths. But it was created for a rational age.
It is very comforting to believe that leaders who do terrible things are, in fact, mad. That way, all we have to do is make sure we don’t put psychotics in high places and we’ve got the problem solved.
Nonfiction is never going to die.
Most people don’t read editorial pages. I think I must have been 40 before I even looked at an editorial page.
Miami is a melting pot in which none of the stones melt. They rattle around.
I’ve never met an American who wanted to build an empire.
I’m a great believer in outlines.
You can be denounced from the heavens, and it only makes people interested.
My entire career, in fiction or nonfiction, I have reported and written about people who are not like me.
Not long after I published my first book, I quickly found I was terrible at being interviewed.
Television reporters aren’t really called reporters. They are called researchers. And that’s really all they are.
No machines will ever truly fully figure the brain out, because the brain’s performance is constantly altered or else constrained by this inanimate, rogue artifact you can’t control, namely, speech.
People complain about my exclamation points, but I honestly think that’s the way people think. I don’t think people think in essays; it’s one exclamation point to another.
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 wrote a number of pieces in the year 1966 that were so bad that, although I’m a great collector of my own pieces, I have never collected them.
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.
Vietnam was really an idealistic thing to stop the spread of communism, which, incidentally, it did. It was a pretty costly way to do it, but it achieved its goal.
The notion that the public accepts or rejects anything in modern art is merely romantic fiction. The game is completed and the trophies distributed long before the public knows what has happened.
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.
If you label it this, then it can’t be that.