I'm too vain to go on TV. I'd be a monster of self-consciousness. Plus, I've got a ridiculous voice - I sound like a camp friend of Bertie Wooster's.
When I joined the Sunday Times the people I was competing with were all 10 or 15 years younger, they all had double firsts from Oxford or Cambridge, they were all bright as new pins.
You see, the problem with Dave Cameron is that people know who he is. The less people know about him, the more he's likely to get re-elected.
I find Cambridge an asylum, in every sense of the word.
The encouragement I got from Campbell was a quick check and praise. Once the Space Beagle was launched on its mission, it seemed natural for it to breed additional thoughts.
Recruiting Station was a story that came as the result of many anxious awakenings during many nights.
It came about as follows: over the years when I was involved in dianetics, I wrote the beginnings of many stories. I would get an idea, and then write the beginning, and then never touch it again.
A lot of cable television is shot on a single camera. Our eyes are more trained to that. It takes the camera off the crane, away from observing the action, to becoming a character in the story along with everyone else. People are getting used to that.
It is impossible for me to estimate how many of my early impressions of the world, correct and the opposite, came to me through newspapers. Homicide, adultery, no-hit pitching, and Balkanism were concepts that, left to my own devices, I would have encountered much later in life.
I think I became a Catholic to annoy my father.
