Every man who is high up likes to think that he has done it all himself, and the wife smiles and lets it go at that. I'm very much an optimist. I don't think I could do my work if I didn't believe there was some kind of hope for humanity. Once a week we go to juvenile hall and talk to boys there. Just go and spend a day in the juvenile courts. I know nothing at all about oral sex. I broke up both my own marriages over it. It's almost like a genre rule: Don't Open The Box. Muhammad Ali was the kind of guy you either loved or hated, but you wanted to see him. I happen to really love him. He brought boxing to another level and always made you laugh. I've been around horses, but I certainly wouldn't call myself a horseman by any means. It's a combination of being very aware of them, and not trusting them. It helped me in the air to keep my small mind contained in earthly human limits, not lost in vertiginous space and elements unknown. We never taste happiness in perfection, our most fortunate successes are mixed with sadness. TO preach a sermon or edit a newspaper were the two things in life which I always felt I could do with credit to myself and benefit to the world, if I only had the chance. Man knows so much and does so little. To achieve harmony in bad taste is the height of elegance. I am concerned, rather, that there should not be more things dreamt of in my philosophy than there actually are in heaven and earth. But now with technology I could sit down and do a bunch of character drawings and scan them into a computer, and the computer using my exact style could bring it into life, where it would have been edited by various human beings before. They may well say not only is this not true, but I will put in an injunction to prevent publication. No, stories don't go in unless I'm convinced by the people who write them that they're true. And if I'm wrong, then so be it. I may have many faults, but being wrong ain't one of them. I want to sing like Aretha Franklin. Before her I wanted the technical ability of Ella Fitzgerald. I'll be honest with you: not a chance in this world. But you know, stranger things have happened. If anybody starts using me as scenery, I'll return to New York. Hamlet is an astonishing intelligence. Just after World War II, this country led the world in science by every way you could measure it, yet the number of scientists was a tiny proportion of what it is now. I think American audiences are quite interesting in that they can handle almost any amount of violence, but the moment the violence becomes sexual violence it immediately becomes an issue. I grew up and I became very successful at what I did as a young man. I became a work addict because this was the only way I could get any relief from this pain. We slow the progress of science today for all sorts of ethical reasons. Biomedicine could advance much faster if we abolished our rules on human experimentation in clinical trials, as Nazi researchers did. It might be a bad thing, not to know what's going on in the world. I can't say I really approve of it. I don't live for poetry. I live far more than anybody else does. On my parents' scale of values, the more Western something was, the more cultured it was considered. If you're happy, if you're feeling good, then nothing else matters. I don't intend to simply go away and write my plays and be a good boy. I intend to remain an independent and political intelligence in my own right. If it feels right and I'm not going against any energy in myself or the situation, there would be no limit. Lutherans, whose arguments and mistakes will not be difficult to contest or discover, do not want to attribute any value to works, and they do not understand enough the scope of the justification. If a person with a bullet in Dallas can change the world, imagine a person with an idea could do. God has been pleased to save us during the years of war that have already passed. We pray that He may be pleased to save us to the end. But we must do our part. Any time you got nothing to do - and lots of time to do it - come on up. Sometimes a concept is baffling not because it is profound but because it is wrong.