The Berserkers have been with me for about FORTY YEARS, and we're not DONE yet.

The comments I most APPRECIATE come from ordinary readers who've HAPPENED on one of my books at some time of STRESS in their LIVES, and who actually CREDIT the book with helping them through a bad time. It's happened a few times in forty years.

I MEAN, what Fiat had it was not very BIG, it was something like forty or fifty million dollars, but it's ENOUGH to get revolving credit, to get starting AWAY again, the buying of NEW machinery.

So I WRITE melodies - thirty, FORTY, fifty - then I cast them off until I have just TWO or three. If only one is needed, I go see the director and ASK him to DECIDE.

We are now BEYOND nature's normal variation in TERMS of how the atmosphere is composed. Nature did something for a MILLION years. It actually GOES back a lot further than that, but the ice core RECORDS show a million years. So, nature has this normal oscillation within this zone, and all of a sudden, we're forty percent outside that zone.

They were heading out to the middle of the bay - the Gulf - that's another thing that BECAME KIND of standard practice, we didn't hurry the destroyers AROUND the beach any more, when it got dark, we'd take 'em out thirty or forty miles out in the middle of the Tonkin Gulf.

I had always SAID to myself that forty was the CUT off POINT of my APPRENTICESHIP which may for some people sound LIKE a very long one, but the novel as art is a middle-aged art.

My MOTHER was widowed TWICE before she TURNED FORTY.

So now, thirty years, FORTY years later, I MEAN, I could find a whole orchestra of a THOUSAND to put these things TOGETHER in New York City alone. In those days, if I could scrape up twenty MUSICIANS to do this it was something extraordinary.

I've led this EMPTY life for over FORTY YEARS and now I can pass that heritage on and ensure that the misery will continue for at LEAST one more GENERATION.

It's better to have LOVED and lost than to have to do FORTY POUNDS of LAUNDRY a week.

Before I TOOK the veil, I was ornamented for the ceremony, and was clothed in a rich DRESS belonging to the Convent, which was used on such OCCASIONS; and placed not FAR from the altar in the chapel, in the VIEW of a number of spectators who had assembled, perhaps about forty.