To get people to do needed things is the perennial hard task of government, not to mention of religion and philosophy.

Americans have no idea of the extent of their government's mischief... the number of military strikes we have made unprovoked, against other countries, since 1947 is more than 250.

In August 1961, I visited President Kennedy at Hyannis Port. The Berlin Wall was going up, and he was about to begin a huge military buildup - reluctantly, or so he said, as he puffed on a cigar liberated by a friend from Castro's Cuba.

A friend was surprised to hear me say that there was not one moment of my past that I would like to relive.

Death is the ugly fact which Nature has to hide, and she hides it well.

Going through an illness and then death of a close friend has changed my attitudes to friendship enormously.

I like to behave in an extremely normal, wholesome manner for the most part in my daily life. Even if mentally I'm consumed with sick visions of violence, terror, sex and death.

I was not encouraged to follow the career of a writer because my parents thought that I was going to starve to death. They thought nobody can make a living from being a writer in Brazil. They were not wrong.