After [Bill Shawn] was fired, I was going to the YMHA [Young Men's Hebrew Association] on the Upper East Side to do a talk on free speech.I went into a coffee shop to get a piece of pie and a coffee, and I was reading a paper and I hear a voice. And it was -it was not a voice I was familiar with, but I looked across the table and I saw Lilian Ross.And sitting next to her was William Shawn - no tie, needed a shave. His voice was kind of coarse and rather loud. He wasn't drunk, but I was just stunned.

[Margot Hentoff] thinks - first of all, she - this I hear from a lot of people beside her. She thinks that men have no business getting into this argument at all unless they're going to be pro-choice. But it turns out that a fair number of fetuses are male, and besides that, we are all one part of humankind, it seems to me.

The person who has the strong ownership of free speech is the one who owns the press.

I wish [my wife] would [work] because - especially now the kind of - I mean, honesty is hardly the word. She writes with a ferocity of clarity that - nobody else around has now.

I have I guess 3 passions. One is the Constitution. The other is jazz and the other is being an atheist prolifer which, of course, gets me in a lot of trouble - all of which combines into free expression.

I don't think [Bill Clinton] does anything - I don't think it's ill will. I don't think he's evil in the sense that he hates the Bill of Rights. He does what he figures will help him politically.

The main jobs would be The New Yorker, The Village Voice, The Washington Post and - I'm thinking of The Reporter when Max Askeli was there, but I got fired from The Reporter.