Quotes

Young people today seem to admire Sammy [his fictional character Sammy Glick]. I do find it rather disconcerting. Once I was speaking at a college, and a young man came up afterwards and said, 'I just want to shake your hand. I'm a senior, and I've been worrying about how I'll make it in the real world. And now that I've read your book, I'm inspired.'

[on his friendly testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee] "I don't feel what some people expect me to feel. What's painful is to have believed in something that sounded so right, and that turned out the way the Soviet Union turned out. It's more the disillusionment that hurts for me."

On testifying and naming names before the House Un-American Activities Committee: "I didn't especially like the [House] committee, but I didn't like the way the party was trying to take over the Screenwriters Guild - they had put four young people on the board, including me. I felt that what the party was doing secretively was very wrong - it could have been the Ku Klux Klan or the American Nazis. And nobody came out and said that Stalin was killing more people than Hitler - I resented the fact that they only defended their side."