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

After [Bill Shawn] was fired, I was going to the YMHA [Young Men's Hebrew Association] on the Upper East Side to do a talk on free speech.I went into a coffee shop to get a piece of pie and a coffee, and I was reading a paper and I hear a voice. And it was -it was not a voice I was familiar with, but I looked across the table and I saw Lilian Ross.And sitting next to her was William Shawn - no tie, needed a shave. His voice was kind of coarse and rather loud. He wasn't drunk, but I was just stunned.

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.

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.

I say this because the Left has taken what passes for their principles as an absolute religion. They don't think anymore. They just react. When they have somebody like [Barack] Obama whom they put into office, they believed in the religious sense and, of course, that is a large part of the reason for their silence on these issues.

I write a column for The Village Voice, which I've done since time immemorial, and occasionally - and books. And I occasionally write minor notes for record albums and occasional articles.

William Shawn was the editor of The New Yorker and for whom I worked for, God, 27 years; a man I respected enormously because of what he did, - what the magazine was about.