I always wanted to be a lawyer,but I certainly never wanted to be a trapeze performer.

What's wrong with it is, it lowers, to say the least, the credibility of the magazine. And if I were writing for [The New Republic ], I would feel diminished because the owner had done such a thing [fire a journalist].

What we have now in America is a surveillance society.

Bob Dylan was really mad with my wife. I had asked by Rolling Stone - the only assignment I ever had for them - to do a story on the Rolling Thunder Review, which was Bob Dylan, Alan Ginsberg, Joan Baez and a host of stars. My wife, some weeks before, had written in The New York Times that The Kid wasn't The Kid anymore and he wasn't all that winning anymore.

Being pro-life is a basic perspective of everything I do.

I say personally because I am 84 years old, and [Barack Obama's] is the first administration that has scared me in terms of my lifespan.

The habeas corpus business, that's to show that he [Bill Clinton] is not tough on crime.