Somebody who won't go to the doctor for a normal checkup is fearful and nervous. ... But once you find out what it's like on the other side, you can go beyond fear.

At first I - I felt that it was confined to my liver and that they had - the operation had completely removed it. And so I felt quite relieved. And then that same afternoon we had an MRI of my head and neck and it showed up that it was already in four places in my brain. So I would say that night and the next day, until I came back up to Emory, I just thought I had a few weeks left. But I was surprisingly at ease. You know, I've had a wonderful life. I've had thousands of friends and I've had an exciting and adventurous and gratifying existence. So I was surprisingly at ease, much more so than my wife was.

Yes, these are subjects that we think about all the time but don’t necessarily talk about. Everybody has thought about if they want to be cremated, buried, or whatever.

But if I was sitting in an armchair with bits and pieces of rubber sticking out of me and my son came over and said, you know, would you like a banana? Wink once for yes, wink twice for no, I dont think the interest of the conversation would get me past the sense that this is horrible. It's horrible for me but above all, horrible for them. There are things worse than death.

Bad things happening to my children and grandchildren.

I was going to be a journalist. But after the war I studied anthropology, just in order to become educated. I thought it was worth knowing the science of man. I still intended to become a journalist, but there were no jobs, because the reporters who had gone to war were coming back and were entitled to their jobs, and the women who had replaced them were damned if they’d leave, and they shouldn’t have left.

In our lives, we do our best to serve our community well, behave decently, and treat people well.

If I were a religious person, my first question would be "Where the hell is God?" But I never expected him to be on the job.

The real goal is to make your soul go, not to make a living. Practicing art, even in a mediocre way, can make the soul go.

I don’t think I can control my life or my writing. Every other writer I know feels he is steering himself, and I don’t have that feeling. I don’t have that sort of control. I’m simply becoming.