I like [John Cardinal O'Connor] a lot. He - I started a - to know him - when I asked William Shawn at The New Yorker, `Sh - can I do a profile of Cardinal O'Connor?' He said, `All right. Find out what he's like.' So I went to his office, and I heard somebody - and it turned out to be O'Connor - yelling outside, and I've never heard him since raise his voice.

Max Askeli was a very courageous, principled man up to a point. He had left Italy before he was thrown in jail by [Francesco] Mussolini.

Malcolm X made it very clear that if somebody goes after you - whether it's cops or not - you have to defend yourself. But he was not an advocate for violence the way the Black Panthers were.

A good many people voted for [Barack] Obama, and I'm not only talking about the black vote. A lot of people voted for Obama because of our history of racial discrimination in this country.

My mother, when she was younger, worked at Filene's in Boston. And she was chief cashier. And I always wondered why she never went back to some kind of work 'cause that was a very responsible position.

[Barack] Obama has little, if any, principles except to aggrandize and make himself more and more important.

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.