As far as cutting jobs, you could cut whole agencies out of the federal government and not miss them.

You trivialize the idea of competition totally, then there's no point in having the competition in the first place, and everybody is getting a trophy.

Those differences are what color the performance, but in the movies you don't get a chance to rehearse.

You're in the public eye and you just hope that people don't come up and interrupt you while your in the middle of a meal or a conversation or something like that.

I'd change nothing in my career path. I was never built for being a handsome teenage star. That's just not in my psyche, I think. I would have hated to have grown up famous.

Probably the biggest influence on my career was the late John Hersey, who, while he was at 'The New Yorker,' wrote one of the masterpieces of narrative non-fiction, 'Hiroshima.' Hersey was a teacher of mine at Yale, and a friend. He got me to see the possibility of journalism not just as a business but as an art form.

I always liked having a good time. I got into this business because I got fired from any job I ever had because I stayed out late playing music.

In 1989, I retired from Bell Laboratories to become a full-time writer. Not that I didn't enjoy my engineering career, but rather I liked being a novelist just a bit better.