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.

I have always been fascinated by the human mind, conscious and unconscious - that is what writing and reading is about, too. The why of your life and the why of your choices and the what has happened that you know and the what that you don't know is really riveting, and psychoanalysts share my wonder at how it all unfolds.

The truth is not a bidimensional thing; it's not flat. It's rounded; it's like a sphere, so there's always a hidden face. There's one that is revealed because there's light reflecting on it, but there's always a hidden one, and once you go around to see the hidden one, it moves, and that's life.

I have to pick myself up every day and say, 'The show must go on,' meaning life as I know it must go on, whatever the obstacle is, I know I can handle it, and I can get through it.

There is nothing compared to the feeling of losing life. The moment when you are close to death is nothing but a profound experience.