[Miranda Hentoff] was teaching once at Lincoln Center, and the hall was full of other professionals - musicians, professors, teachers. And she was explaining how [Béla] Bartok composed his second piano concerto. And she explained how the music was interwoven with the rhythms and what he had in his mind. And I was just stunned. This is a kid who used to work - on a piano with a cracked keyboard.

I told [a big investor in The New Yorker] - I was complaining the way writers complain.I said`[Bill Shawn] pays very well, but a lot of my pieces don't get in,' and that was true of most of the writers there.But he pays you for them, that was very nice of him. This guy didn't think it was very nice. He figured, `Oh, my God, that's more of my investment gone,' and paying money to writers for not printing them. That became, apparently, one of his weapons against Shawn when he - in the corporate skirmishes that went on. It was a bad mistake on my part.

There wasn't much said, but I was thinking, perhaps unkindly - not unkindly,but on - inaccurately of Theodore Dreiser's "Carrie," when the main character in "Carrie" has been brought down by Carrie and his - he - dress is disheveled and all that sort of thing. And that's the last I ever saw of [Will Shawn].

I was introduced to jazz, and that's become a basic concern and passion of mine ever since.

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

I was very much against the Vietnam War, and Max Askeli was visiting Lyndon Johnson in the White House cheering him on, writing editorials. And in The Voice one day I once referred to him as Commander Askeli. And I called in to The Reporter to go over the galleys of a music piece I had written, and the editor whispered to me, `It's not gonna run. You're not gonna run. Max Askeli has fired you because of what you said about him.'

When I was a kid in Boston, it was one of the most anti-Semitic cities in the country. If you were living in the ghetto as I was, the Jewish ghetto part of Roxbury, and you went out alone at night, you might be subject to having people attacking you for being a Christ killer.