HOWARD FAST

My books were attacked constantly by the Communist Party for not hewing to the Party line. I have never hewed to a Party line of any kind.

I'm disenchanted with Communism and most other things. I'm cynical but not a cynic. I'm cynical about TV, Congress, and commercial peanut butter.

A critic is a eunuch working in a harem. He watches it, but he knows he can't do it. Critics very often are failed writers and, like failed priests, they hate religion.

The play is a marvelous form, but it demands less than a novel.

I was part of a generation that believed in socialism and finally found that belief corroded and destroyed. That is not renouncing Communism or socialism. It's reaching a certain degree of enlightenment about what the Soviet Union practices.

After the Spanish Civil War against Franco, a group of us got together: a group of well-to-do people who were sympathetic to the lost cause of a Republican state. We bought a convent in Toulouse and converted it into a hospital run by the Unitarians. It took care of the Spanish refugees who fled to Toulouse.

Since I believe that a person's philosophical point of view has little meaning if it is not matched by being and action, I found myself willingly wed to an endless series of unpopular causes, experiences which I feel enriched my writing as much as they depleted other aspects of my life.

I was in federal prison in West Virginia for three months for contempt of Congress for a refusing to comply with a request of a Congressional committee of Congress, the House Un-American Activities Committee.

The only thing that infuriates me is that I have more unwritten stories in me than I can conceivably write in a lifetime.

I always thought that socialism here would be peculiarly American, with some reasonable, post-industrial evolution between working-class needs and market forces. It won't be bloody like the Russian Revolution.

The Rosenberg case had been orchestrated to an anti-Communist frenzy that matched the exuberant hysteria of the Nazi horror.

To be dogmatic about a cause you believe in at the age of 20 or 30 is not unusual. But to be dogmatic at age 55 or 60 shows a lack of any learning capacity.

In L.A., you work like hell because there is nothing else to do, unless you're cheating on your wife.

I was born and grew up in the greatest, the noblest achievement of the human race on this planet - which was called the United States of America.

Like most thoughtful people who watch what's going on in Washington, venting is very necessary.

It's been said that I am the most widely read writer of the 20th century. The number of books I've sold runs into untold millions.

Americans have no sense of history. And not much memory. They don't remember what happened yesterday.

A man who will traduce those who stood with him in battle is not worth much.

We [communists] took the noblest dreams and hopes of mankind as our credo; the evil that we did was to accept the degradation of our own souls.

Like a foul fistula, overloaded with pus, this corruption exploded in the presentation of the Bollingen-Library of Congress award to the fascist poet, Ezra Pound.

What the poor did to the poor was the business of the poor, not the business of the proper people who ran the city.

In the beginning, all men were alike and they lived in peace and they shared among them what they had. But now there are two kinds of men, the master and the slave. But there are more of us than there are of you, many more. And we are stronger than you, better than you. All that is good in mankind belongs to us.

Most assuredly Zen is a religion, but it is a religion without scripture, without doctrine or dogma and without sin.

Only people who suffer show the ravages of age.

A mountain still in the distance can appear as a molehill.