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. That book had a number of sort of rites of passage for me.

Inside that quietude there was the firmest of wills. [Bill Shawn] knew exactly what he wanted to do.

I am hesitant to say this about [Barack] Obama. Obama is a bad man in terms of the Constitution.

We disagree heavily on abortion [with Margot Hentoff].

[My wife Margot] was the - I guess, the coordinator or the production manager [of The Jazz Review], and we got to know each other and we married.

[Barack Obama to be] much worse [than George W. Bush].

I know [Arthur Koestler] fought in the Spanish Civil War. He was in prison, I think, in Spain and in Russia. He came to the United States; that's when I saw him in the mid-1940s.