The second wife [Trudi Bernstein] - the best part of that union, our two daughters, and that lasted about five years.

I spent a lot of time studying our Founders and people like Samuel Adams and the original Tea Party. What Adams and the Sons of Liberty did in Boston was spread the word about the abuses of the British. They had Committees of Correspondence that got the word out to the colonies. We need Committees of Correspondence now, and we are getting them.

Congressman [Richard ] Icord headed a House on American activities committee. It was called the House Internal Security Committee. And he put out a report, and he named a number of very destructive people who lectured at colleges and left arson in their wake and did other terrible things. And he mentioned me and he ascribed to me three organizations to which I'd never belonged, and I decided I would do something about this.

[Barack Obama] pledged to end torture, but he has continued the CIA renditions where you kidnap people and send them to another country to be interrogated.

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

The general unemployment rate is going to continue for a long time and for all of us. I have never heard so many heart-wrenching stories of all kinds of people all across the economic spectrum.

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.