I have forced myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.

I have forced myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own tastes.

I force myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.

Going against the grain.

All my life I have been acutely aware of a contradiction in the very nature of my existence. For forty-five years I struggled to resolve this dilemma by writing plays and novels. The more I wrote, the more I realized mere words were not enough. So I found another form of expression.

There are times when I am so unlike myself that I might be taken for someone else of an entirely opposite character.

I am often described to my irritation as a 'contrarian' and even had the title inflicted on me by the publisher of one of my early books. (At least on that occasion I lived up to the title by ridiculing the word in my introduction to the book's first chapter.) It is actually a pity that our culture doesn't have a good vernacular word for an oppositionist or even for someone who tries to do his own thinking: the word 'dissident' can't be self-conferred because it is really a title of honor that has to be won or earned, while terms like 'gadfly' or 'maverick' are somehow trivial and condescending as well as over-full of self-regard. And I've lost count of the number of memoirs by old comrades or ex-comrades that have titles like 'Against the Stream,' 'Against the Current,' 'Minority of One,' 'Breaking Ranks' and so forth — all of them lending point to Harold Rosenberg's withering remark about 'the herd of independent minds.' Even when I was quite young I disliked being called a 'rebel': it seemed to make the patronizing suggestion that 'questioning authority' was part of a 'phase' through which I would naturally go. On the contrary, I was a relatively well-behaved and well-mannered boy, and chose my battles with some deliberation rather than just thinking with my hormones.

I am a person always full of contradictions... It was hard to choose whether to devote myself to revolution as a soldier or as a writer.

What I claim is to live to the full the contradiction of my time, which may well make sarcasm the condition of truth.

It was an unusual background and I often felt a cultural clash between my school and home environments.

Ultimately I am an employee of a corporation, and that’s weird, and does contradict some of the things I believe in. But at the same time, I have to make a living.

I like contradictions. We have never attained the infinite variety and contradictions that exist in nature. Tomorrow I shall contradict myself. That is the one way I have of asserting my liberty, the real liberty one does not find as a member of society.

With me and my queer nature, that set me so at odds with the world and all its ordinary rules, I could not find a place in it to live and be content.

I'm inconsistent, even to myself.