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I won a Marshall scholarship to read philosophy at Oxford, and what I most wanted to do was strengthen public intellectual culture - I'd write books and essays to help us figure out who we wanted to be.

There were various turning points, but the main one at the beginning was that I was going off to do another degree in the history of art. I would have ended up as some art historian at Sotheby's or something.

I became an academic so that I could share my knowledge and experience with students.

I set my sights upon becoming the kind of artist who would make a contribution to art history.

I would have liked maybe to be in architecture or painting, something connected to the fine arts.

I think I would have been a writer, anyhow, in the sense of having written a story every now and then, or continued writing poetry. But it was the war experience and the two novels I wrote about Vietnam that really got me started as a professional writer.

I would have been a visual artist. When I was in high school, that was one of the things... I had to make a decision what I was going to go to college for, and at the time, I also painted and sculpted. I got more attention for my performing, so I thought that was a better idea.

I would have liked to have been a professor of sociology.

I would have been a geologist.