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.

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

[Søren ] Kierkegaard said it for me a long time ago. He said, `You can't really think yourself into a faith, into a religion. It's something you have to make a leap into faith.' And I've never been able to do that. I wish I could. Then maybe I could believe in an afterlife.

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.

You have to be careful about what you do, about what you say, and that is more dangerous than what was happening with [John] McCarthy, but the technology the government now possesses is so much more insidious.

I've never met anybody quite like [Bill Shawn]. He created - and I'm sure it was conscious - an aura about him of quietude.

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