I've been reading since I could read, which was about four or five years old.

A good many people voted for [Barack] Obama, and I'm not only talking about the black vote. A lot of people voted for Obama because of our history of racial discrimination in this country.

This sounds corny, but I once told a kid when I was in a the library conference, the best - not the best, what I really hope for is that someday 20, 30 years from now, some kid, 12-year-old, 15-year-old, in Des Moines will be going through the stacks, if they have stacks anymore - they probably won't - and find a book of mine and get something from it.

Margot [Hentoff] used to write regularly for The Voice, for The New York Review of Books, for Harper's Bazaar, and she really had the most distinctive writing style, even more than mine, than I've ever seen in this business.

[I wanted] to play the clarinet well so I could be in Duke Ellington's band, but that's now impossible.

[Barack] Obama seems to have no firm principles that I can discern that he will adhere to.

It was a competitive examination [in Boston Latin School]. Poor kids, Brahmans, middle-class kids. The masters, as the teachers were called, didn't give a damn about - how we felt, what was - things like at home. I mean, this goes against the current grain. All they thought about was: `You're here. You made the exam. You can do the work. And if you can't, we'll throw you out.'