You see that in his foreign policy [Barack] Obama lacks a backbone - both a constitutional backbone and a personal backbone.

[Barack Obama] pledged to end torture, but he has continued the CIA renditions where you kidnap people and send them to another country to be interrogated.

I went to a lecture of [Arthur Koestler ] once, I never met him.

[My wife Margot] was the - I guess, the coordinator or the production manager [of The Jazz Review], and we got to know each other and we married.

What we have now in America is a surveillance society.

Why has slamming a ball with a racquet become so obsessive a pleasure for so many of us? It seems clear to me that a primary attraction of the sport is the opportunity it gives to release aggression physically without being arrested for felonious assault.

I got Joan Baez to talk and Alan Ginsberg and some of the guys in the band. And by the end of the piece, another emissary came and said, `Bob [Dylan] is willing to speak to you now.' And I said with great pleasure, `No, thanks. The piece is over.'