[Arthur Koestler] wrote some other very interesting books, but that book - I mean, if I were teaching, I don't care what the course is, I would say you really have to read "Darkness at Noon".

I had written a book called "Boston Boy" some years ago, and that took me from the time I could speak, I guess, in Boston through the time when I finally left to come to New York. One was understanding and coping with anti-Semitism. Boston, at the time, was the most anti-Semitic city in the country. And I found out when I was an adolescent that you have to be crazy to go out after dark all by yourself; you'd get your head bashed in.

Allen Ginsberg was a remarkable guy. He was himself. He was an original.

However, I never thought that [George W.] Bush himself was, in any sense, "evil."

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.

Under the British healthcare system, there is a commission that decides whether or not, based on your age and physical condition, the government should continue to pay for your health.

I wish [my wife] would [work] because - especially now the kind of - I mean, honesty is hardly the word. She writes with a ferocity of clarity that - nobody else around has now.