These were my people -- as used as I was to wanting love from nowhere, as certain as I was that almost anything desirable was likely to be booby-trapped.

There are almost no characters in this story, and almost no dramatic confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces. One of the main effects of war, after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters.

What makes you think a writer isn't a drug salesman?

A lack of seriousness has led to all sorts of wonderful insights.

Oh, sure, we have another world war coming, and another great depression, but where are the leaders this time?

Scum of the Earth as some may be in their daily lives, they can all be saints in emergencies.

As a Humanist, I love science. I hate superstition, which could never have given us A-bombs.

The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable.

Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?

World War II made war reputable because it was a just war. I wouldn't have missed it for anything. You know how many other just wars there have been? Not many. And the guys I served with became my brothers. If it weren't for World War II, I'd now be the garden editor of The Indianapolis Star. I wouldn't have moved away.

I went to high school in Indianapolis I learned how to walk around looking tough because everybody had to do that. I go out there occasionally and they're still doing it, walking around looking very tough because something might happen.

Somebody gets into trouble, then gets out of it again. People love that story. They never get tired of it.

One good thing about TV is, if you die violently, God forbid, on camera, you will not have died in vain because you will be great entertainment.

Nietzsche had a little one-liner on how to choose a wife. He said, ''Are you willing to have a conversation with this woman for the next forty years?'' That's how to pick a wife.

Kilgore Trout once wrote a short story which was a dialogue between two pieces of yeast. They were discussing the possible purposes of life as they ate sugar and suffocated in their own excrement. Because of their limited intelligence, they never came close to guessing that they were making champagne.

They sent a child, did they? said Noel Constant.

The visitor was not offended. He turned the gibe to his own advantage, using it in an image of himself that was chilling indeed. A child with a heart of stone and a mind as quick as a mongoose, Mr. Constant, he said. I have also been to Harvard Business School.

And Lot's wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human. So she was turned into a pillar of salt. So it goes.

Characters paralyzed by the meaninglessness of modern life still have to drink water from time to time.

It is harder to be unhappy when you are eating.

I pity the Jews trying to get through life with only half a Bible. That's like trying to get from here to San Francisco with a road map that stops at Dubuque, Iowa.