"When you’re a kid, a rural, agriculturally-based colony town is a lot of fun to grow up in. It’s life on a farm, with goats and chickens and fields of wheat and sorghum, harvest celebrations and winter festivals. There’s not an eight- or nine-year-old kid who’s been invented who doesn’t find all of that unspeakably fun. But then you become a teenager and you start thinking about everything you might possibly want to do with your life, and you look at the options available to you. And then all farms, goats and chickens—and all the same people you’ve known all your life and will know all your life—begin to look a little less than optimal for a total life experience. It’s all the same, of course. That’s the point. It’s you who’s changed."

"But then we assume on our paper that nobody thinks. Which is all right. But where we're wrong—and of course I'm not really including myself but mean the top boys—is in thinking that our readers, dumb …"

"There is not, nor should there be, an irreconcilable contrast between the individual and the collective,… There should be no such contrast, because collectivism, Socialism, does not deny, but combines…"

"I’m doing this role because tons and tons of people are going to see me and it’s just about being the spotlight. And I’m not saying that that element is completely erased, the enjoyment, and the momen…"

"I want to finish work on my mother's juvenile by the end of June. There's a curious half-angry reluctance in my writing for other people. I say to myself that whatever earnings there may be are all in…"