But his old stuff was wonderful. His collaboration stories were amazing (especially remember his collaboration with Van Vogt called The Human Operators - also A Boy and His Dog).

He is an egotistical, subversion-for-subversion-sake asshole, though.

I remember one passage of his in a forward to a book of his where he encouraged people to always overpay their bills by one cent. This was supposed to "drive crazy" the accountants. Guess what I was doing for a living when I read that... Yup, I was a nearly minimum-wage remittance clerk at a major California bank. Adding things up wrong, did not drive us crazy - it got us yelled at and went on our records. Funny joke!

Also remember in his Dangerous Visions how he "assigned" a story to write to Robert Bloch (who ain't no slouch, either), printed the story, and also printed basically the story that he would have written had the assignment been given to him. Wrapped with forward text that implied that Bloch didn't quite get it right. Or at least that's how I remember it.

He was kind of a one-man revolution to sci-fi in the 60's/70's. Stories became wierder, and addressed more important topics at his urging. When you read his stuff, compare it to other's work that appeared at the same time.