I guess the best advice I ever got or anyone could get for doing a talk show, though it has not been easy very often, was from Jack Paar, who said, 'Kid, don't make it an interview. Interviews have clipboards, and you're like David Frost. Make it a conversation.'

I like when the ice gets thin, the going gets rough, the guests get edgy.

I have never been converted to or even had much interest in spiritualism, occultism, Swedenborgianism or any particular religion. And I never, except occasionally for a laugh, visit the quacks who call themselves psychics.

Greatly talented performers don't know - often spectacularly - what's best for them, don't know what their talents really are, and don't know what's just plain wrong for them.

Every writer knows that unless you were born gifted with either supreme confidence or outsize ego, handing in your work holds, in some cases, admitted terror. If that's too strong, at least fairly high anxiety.

It was at a vividly bad time in Norman Mailer's life that I met him, and a sort of water-treading time in mine. He had stabbed his wife, and I was a copy boy at Time magazine.

Sloppy language leads to sloppy thought, and sloppy thought to sloppy legislation.