I cannot even picture myself retiring. What would I do? I'll always be doing something, asking somebody questions, even if there weren't a book.

One day I visited a guy who had made a fortune as a broker. He was sitting in his office with his computer. I hire people from here and make deals from this room, he told me. Then he took me to the trading room. Nobody was talking to anybody else, the place was silent as a tomb, they were all sitting there watching their terminals - a great word, terminal. I tell you, it scares the crap out of me.

Having been blacklisted from working in television during the McCarthy era, I know the harm of government using private corporations to intrude into the lives of innocent Americans. When government uses the telephone companies to create massive databases of all our phone calls it has gone too far.

Reading a book should not be a passive exercise, but rather a raucous conversation.

We are living in the United States of Alzheimer's. A whole country has lost its memory. When it can't remember yesterday, a country forgets what it once wanted to be.

Unless there's a grassroots movement of some sort, with TV and the media in general in the hands of fewer and fewer people - the Murdochians, you know - all we hear is the one point of view. There has to be something communal.

Don't be an examiner, be the interested inquirer.