Change is legitimate and inevitable, for our language is a mighty river, picking up silt and flotsam here and discarding it there, but growing ever wider and richer.

And I'm in favor of that because I have a gay son, who's a very successful theater designer.

Wordstruck is exactly what I was—and still am: crazy about the sound of words, the look of words, the taste of words, the feeling for words on the tongue and in the mind.

The greatest luxury is being able to go to movies and plays now and then in the afternoons.

Yes, after some time spent last year on other commitments, most of them speaking engagements, I am now about halfway through a novel that I hope will come out in 1998.

I think one of the lessons we learn in life - and it's an old lesson, but each of us has to learn it, if he does, individually - and that is that, in human relations, particularly sexual relations and so on, the person you might most trust and feel most comfortable and easy with isn't necessarily the person your heart is going to fall for.

We spent a month in Japan last year, a week in Istanbul for the United Nations, and nearly three months in my native Nova Scotia, where my two brothers have homes; and we'll go back there this summer.