I've never met anybody quite like [Bill Shawn]. He created - and I'm sure it was conscious - an aura about him of quietude.

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

We need to keep trying to rescue the Constitution from the President.

You have an electorate [in America] that wants to see people who are not tough on crime.

[People] felt good even though they didn't really know much about [Barack Obama] and may have had some doubts.

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.

My favorite story about O'Connor - one of them - is I was in Toronto at a pro-life conference.I had a session before he was to come on,I thought very moderately - that not have unwanted abortions was to have much more research on contraception. Two true-faith people came out of the audience, wrested the microphone out of my hand and said, `That is im - inappropriate, improper. Pro-lifers do not believe in contraception.' [John] O'Connor's watching this said,`I want to tell you I'm delighted that Nat is not a member of the Catholic Church. We have enough trouble as it is.'