I was writing - at least beginning to write Boston Boy and there were a lot of holes in my so-called research. I didn't know the towns my mother and father came from in Russia. I didn't know the name of the clothing store I went to work for when I was 11 years old. I didn't know a lot of things. So I called for my FBI files, not expecting to have that stuff there, but I wanted to know what they had on me.But they did have the towns my mother and father lived in in Russia. They had the grocery store I worked in when I was 11 years old.

Martin Williams persistently gets at essences, and that is why he has contributed so much to the very small body of authentic jazz criticism.

The need for a pro-life point of view undergirds everything you do.

[John] McCarthy's regime was ended by Senators who realized that he had gone too far. What we have now may be more insidious.

As Harry Blackmun said when he wrote Roe v. Wade, `Once a child is born, the child has basic constitutional rights: due process, equal protection of the laws.'

Fortune ought to be a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master.

What's wrong with it is, it lowers, to say the least, the credibility of the magazine. And if I were writing for [The New Republic ], I would feel diminished because the owner had done such a thing [fire a journalist].