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.

I never wanted to be a pundit.

I am not really retired, and may never be completely, but I can't think of a better place to contemplate retirement than New York City.

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.

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.

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.

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.