I don't like to hurry. I'm not a conductor of the fast, fiery romantic type. I prefer Bruckner, with the sincerity of his musical language and the huge time spans in which his ideas develop, to Mahler, with his hysteria and self-indulgence.

In the early 1940s, as a young teenager, I was utterly appalled by the racist and jingoist hysteria of the anti-Japanese propaganda. The Germans were evil, but treated with some respect: They were, after all, blond Aryan types, just like our imaginary self-image. Japanese were mere vermin, to be crushed like ants.

In fact, because of this deep desire for peace, the ruling class leaders of this land, from 1945 on, stepped up the hysteria and propaganda to drive into American minds the false notion that danger threatened them from the East.

Whatever hysteria exists is inflamed by mystery, suspicion and secrecy. Hard and exact facts will cool it.

If you want to write, if you want to create, you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned out and sent rambling. You must write every single day of your life. You must read dreadful dumb books and glorious books, and let them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next. You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads. I wish you a wrestling match with your Creative Muse that will last a lifetime. I wish craziness and foolishness and madness upon you. May you live with hysteria, and out of it make fine stories - science fiction or otherwise. Which finally means, may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.

"In a cocoon of individualism. In an authentic bunker of skepticism, nihilism, apolitical non-conformism. Protecting himself from the radiation of mass hysteria and the herd instinct of the matrix system.

In fact because of this deep desire for peace the ruling class leaders of this land from 1945 on stepped up the hysteria and propaganda to drive into American minds the false notion that danger threatened them from the East.

Dinner 'conversation' at the Cohens' meant my sister mom and I relaying in brutal detail the day's events in a state of amplified hysteria while my father listened to his own smooth jazz station in his head.

I have found it easier to identify with the characters who verge upon hysteria who were frightened of life who were desperate to reach out to another person. But these seemingly fragile people are the strong people really.

On stage we just want to generate hysteria. We don't care about looking cool or posing.

Whatever hysteria exists is inflamed by mystery suspicion and secrecy. Hard and exact facts will cool it.