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on and on. Isaac has a Ph.D. in chemistry from Columbia, and was born in Smolensk, in the former Soviet Union, but was raised in Brooklyn. He hated flying, and never read Hemingway or Fitzgerald or Joyce or Kafka, according to his obituary in the
    Times. "I am a
    stranger," he once wrote, "to twentieth-century fiction and poetry."
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    "Isaac," I said, "you should be in the Guinness Book of Records."
    And he said, "To be immortalized along with a rooster named
    who weighed twenty-two
    pounds and killed two cats?"
    I asked him if he was still writing, and he said, "All the time! If I couldn't write all the time, this would be hell for me. Earth would have been a hell for me if I couldn't write all the time. Hell itself would be bearable for me, as long as I could write all the time."
    "Thank goodness there is no Hell," I
    '
    "Enjoyed talking to you," he said, "but I have to get back to work
    a six-volume set about cockamamie
    beliefs in an Afterlife."
    "I myself would cheerfully settle for sleep," I said.
    "Spoken as a true humanist," he said, becoming more antsy by the second.
    "One last question," I begged. "To what do you attribute your incredible productivity?" 77

    Isaac Asimov replied with but a single word:
    "Escape." And then he appended a famous statement by the similarly prolific French writer Jean-Paul Sartre:
    "Hell is other people."
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