I'm persona non grata at the New Yorker.

I think it's a Jewish Yale custom. I wasn't aware that other people celebrated Christmas. My wife was very big on Christmas, and I was very big on my wife.

I've done every other thing in life except intimacy. That's the aberration, the thing I've never had.

To some people, knowledge and science are everything. To me, God is everything I don't know.

Just to put that in some context, 1954 was the same year that From Here to Eternity won an Oscar. Swanson's manufactured its first TV dinner. The Army-McCarthy hearings were televised. The term "under God" was inserted into the "Pledge of Allegiance." Steve Allen's Tonight Show premiered. Ernest Hemingway won the Nobel Prize for Literature. And Bob Dylan was bar mitzvahed.

I had no administrative function at the New Yorker. I am what we used to call in construction back in Kansas City where I grew up "a dog-ass subcontractor."

My father always wanted me to be president of the United States, and his fallback position was that I not become a ward of the county. I think my father was okay about my going into journalism, though.