I knew A.J. Muste very well. I tried for a while to be like he was, and that is a total pacifist. But then Margot [my wife] hit me hard in the stomach one day to prove to me that I wasn't as perfect a pacifist as I thought I was.

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.

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.

That [race] is still part of what [Barack Obama] is riding on. Except that, too, is diminishing.

I went to the library as soon as I could walk. So the training came from reading all kinds of people, from fairy tales and later on to - I don't know why - Schweitz's "Life of Christ."

Liberalism isn't quite as liberal as it pretends to be. And it goes through my adventures with the FBI during the anti-war period and the civil rights period.

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