When I asked him what, if anything, I could do about it, he surprised me by referring me to the director of the hall.

Was I sure, he asked, that I knew what I was applying for??

I asked Rawlins.

`` Why '', he went on, `` when Rob asked me if he could make his dive on this trip, I didn't think twice about it.

I have just asked these questions in the Pentagon, in the White House, in offices of key scientists across the country and aboard the submarines that prowl for months underwater, with neat rows of green launch tubes which contain Polaris missiles and which are affectionately known as `` Sherwood Forest ''.

I asked the same questions inside the launch-control rooms of an Atlas missile base in Wyoming, where officers who wear sidearms are manning the `` commit buttons '' that could start a war -- accidentally or by design -- and in the command centers where other pistol-packing men could give orders to push such buttons.

I asked Wisman what would happen if he broke out the go codes and tried to start transmitting one.

I asked.

How, I asked, could chaos be admitted to chaos??

I asked about the battle between life and death in his plays.

Given a theological lead, I asked what he thinks about those who find a religious significance to his plays.

At a party an English intellectual -- so-called -- asked me why I write always about distress.

I was having lunch not long ago ( apologies to N. V. Peale ) with three distinguished historians ( one specializing in the European Middle Ages, one in American history, and one in the Far East ), and I asked them if they could name instances where the general mores had been radically changed with `` deliberate speed, majestic instancy '' ( Francis Thompson's words for the Hound Of Heaven's Pursuit ) by judicial fiat.

Just as I was about to enlarge upon my discovery of the underside of the leaf of love, memory, displeased at being asked to yield its unsavory secrets, dashed ahead of me, calling back over its shoulder: `` Skip it.

The waspish man stopped me three paces from the bicycle barricade, and asked me in French if I had papers to leave France.

I asked him.

I asked.

One of the girl students, sitting by while I ate the thick soup, asked me if I had a sleeping bag.

I asked him.

Once or twice my father asked me if I wasn't overdoing a bit in my churchgoing.

Forced to realize that this was the end of a very short line I scanned a road marker and discovered what the end of a slightly longer line would be for the old Mexican: Moriarty, New Mexico.

Suddenly a treble auto horn tootley-toot-tootled, and, thumbing hopefully, I saw emergent in windshield flash: red lips, streaming silk of blonde hair and -- ah, trembling confusion of hope, apprehension, despair -- the leering face of old Herry.

Maybe I would beat old Herry to Siberia after all.

If it were not for an old professor who made me read the classics I would have been stymied on what to do, and now I understand why they are classics ; ;

I worked for my Uncle ( an Uncle by marriage so you will not think this has a mild undercurrent of incest ) who ran one of those antique shops in New Orleans' Vieux Carre, the old French Quarter.

I was standing beside her, watching the outspread palms and wondering about the old horsehair sofa against the wall on which he sometimes napped.

`` Yes, George, but I ain't got poor old Pat's body yet.

`` I got Margaret Rider in one of them old box cars down there by the quarry ''.

Besides I heard her old uncle that stays there has been doin' it ''.

If the old fool argues about the price, tell him I shall order my husband not to treat him as a patient any longer.

But I usually stick to the old phrase: ' Ich habe ein Amt, aber keine Meinung ( I hold an office, but I do not feel entitled to have an opinion ).

But I suspect that the old Roman was referring to change made under military occupation -- the sort of change which Tacitus was talking about when he said, `` They make a desert, and call it peace '' ( `` Solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant ''.

I saw a piece the other day assailing William Buckley, author of Man And God at Yale and publisher of The National Review, as no conservative at all, but an old liberal.

I suppose we might classify Billy Graham as an old liberal.

Don't forget, I am an old member of the club, a former delegate.

In The Publick Spirit of the Whigs, it may be noted, Swift himself contemptuously dismissed Steele's reference to his friend at court: `` I suppose by the Style of old Friend, and the like, it must be some Body there of his own Level ; ;

May I say that you have just demonstrated the truth of an old proverb -- the younger Pliny's, if memory serves me -- which, translated freely from the archaic Latin, says, ' The more haste, the less peed ' ''.

`` Baby, I saw a lot of old friends I hadn't seen in a long time '', he told me, his eyes bright.

Never hearing from him again, I remembered the little boy of whom I had had such doubts when he was ten years old.

To the Weston house came once William Allen Neilson, the president of Smith College who had been one of my old professors and who still called me `` Boy '' when I was sixty.

`` Funny thing '', Mr. Kahler said, when they were seated, `` when I heard you ringing, I figured it was that guy down the block, Hausman ''.

My eyes were so bleary I could barely see him but there he was, a little smooth olivefaced guy in a new spring overcoat and a taffycolored fedora.

`` Some day '', I told Eileen, `` that guy will kill us both ''.

`` Maybe you'd better tell the guy who hired you what I said ''.

When I say move, a guy moves ''!!

`` Listen, I got a buddy I travel with, real nice guy named Larry.

`` When you pile your `` guy '' on the bonfire tomorrow night, I wonder how much of the true story of Guy Fawkes you will remember??

I did book jackets and covers for paperback reprints: naked girls huddling in corners of dingy furnished rooms while at the doorway, daring the cops to take him, is the guy in shirt sleeves clutching a revolver.

In the end, I did the same old picture, the naked girl and the guy in the doorway, only I put a Lord Byron shirt on the guy, gave him a sword instead of a pistol, and painted in furniture from the stills of a costume movie.

Much as I love you -- well, a guy's a guy and Lucille's willing to -- to come across.

I know a guy named Jack Hamrick, a very bright young engineer who was with Chrysler, and I took him with me to Allstates.

One anecdote describes Thomas Hunt Morgan banning the Friden calculator from his department at Caltech, saying " Well, I am like a guy who is prospecting for gold along the banks of the Sacramento River in 1849.

All I did was swing a bat at that guy and get swung at in return.

" What I do like about him is he seems to be a guy who's interested in the truth ," Connick Jr. says of Haden.

Because he'd been sitting in my house with my acoustic guitar, writing these songs like ' I Don't Care ', fucking up my guitar, and suddenly he's this guy on stage who you can't take your eyes off of.

" The only way I was going to be able to work on ' A ' projects with really ' A ' directors was if I wasn't the guy who was starring ", he confided to The New York Times writer Trip Gabriel.

I must have been there at least 45 minutes when one of the classical musicians said, ' If this guy Arthur Lee doesn't show up soon, I'm leaving.