My father was pretty independent. He was - he was arrested once in Nashville when he was on one of his sales trips because he had a black - guy to lunch. So that took a fair amount of courage at the time.

Being pro-life is an essential part of being a writer.

They [FBI] had a lot of clippings, a lot of articles I'd written. And to me the - the funniest one was - I had done a piece for Playboy about J. Edgar Hoover.

A particular moment - and I'm not, to this day, quite sure how I feel about it - I had always wanted to be in the law books - you know, Hentoff vs. something or other.

The media has been very bad about informing us about what is going on. They focus on surface things. They do not focus enough on the fact that the Fourth Amendment is on life support and that we need a return to transparency in government.

Margot [Hentoff] used to write regularly for The Voice, for The New York Review of Books, for Harper's Bazaar, and she really had the most distinctive writing style, even more than mine, than I've ever seen in this business.

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