In fact, we have never had more invasions of privacy than we have now [with Barack Obama].

[Barack] Obama has little, if any, principles except to aggrandize and make himself more and more important.

William Shawn was the editor of The New Yorker and for whom I worked for, God, 27 years; a man I respected enormously because of what he did, - what the magazine was about.

Lilian Ross was a - veteran writer for The New Yorker. She, in fact, brought me to The New Yorker many years ago.

When I was a kid in Boston, it was one of the most anti-Semitic cities in the country. If you were living in the ghetto as I was, the Jewish ghetto part of Roxbury, and you went out alone at night, you might be subject to having people attacking you for being a Christ killer.

I grew up in a household in which we had a clock that we won at Revere Beach during the Depression - one of those brass clocks that didn't work - but it showed Franklin D. Roosevelt standing at the wheel of the New Deal.

I like [John Cardinal O'Connor] a lot. He - I started a - to know him - when I asked William Shawn at The New Yorker, `Sh - can I do a profile of Cardinal O'Connor?' He said, `All right. Find out what he's like.' So I went to his office, and I heard somebody - and it turned out to be O'Connor - yelling outside, and I've never heard him since raise his voice.