If reincarnation is a useful biological idea it is certain that somewhere in the universe it will happen.

My mother often mailed me articles from 'Reader's Digest' about advances in DNA chemistry. No matter how I tried to explain it to her, she never grasped the concept that I could have been writing those articles, that something I had invented made most of those DNA discoveries possible.

We are the recipients of scientific method. We can each be a creative and active part of it if we so desire.

I've been writing about my boyhood, when I was a little kid back on my grandfather's farm where we didn't know about black widow spiders or all that stuff. But writing about that is so easy.

In retrospect, the political and cultural climate in the early '60s seems both a time of innocence and also like a sultry, still summer day in the Midwest: an unsettling calm before a ferocious storm over Vietnam, which was not yet an American war.

As writers, we don't just need to write about poverty or war or the immigrant experience.

It's becoming plainer and plainer that what is going on in South America and in South-Eastern Asia is directly related to the war in Russia, for they are all parts of one single Great World War.

We are at war - undeclared and of such a subtle nature that few have noticed - but war nevertheless. It is a cyberwar on many fronts, in which it is difficult to identify who is friend and who is foe. I will predict now, as unintelligible as it may seem, that Anonymous will turn out to be more friend than foe.