[Barack] Obama has little, if any, principles except to aggrandize and make himself more and more important.
[Bill Shawn] didn't edit the writers very strongly, but he knew what he wanted.
[Bill Shawn] had always been in The New Yorker immaculately dressed - quietly, immaculately dressed, very soft-spoken. On the phone I could hardly hear him sometimes.
[Max Askeli] started this very good magazine [The Reporter]. In fact, Meg Greenfield, who's now the editorial page editor of The Washington Post, was one of the star reporters there.
The book that really, really shaped my politics and has forever is Arthur Koestler's "Darkness at Noon," which is a novel based on terrible fact about what it was like in Russia during Stalin's time when people actually believed that to get to the point where the Proletariat would triumph, anything that was necessary to be done should be done; the means didn't count.
Max Askeli was a very courageous, principled man up to a point. He had left Italy before he was thrown in jail by [Francesco] Mussolini.
When I was a kid in Boston, it was one of the most anti-Semitic cities in the country. If you were living in the ghetto as I was, the Jewish ghetto part of Roxbury, and you went out alone at night, you might be subject to having people attacking you for being a Christ killer.
Bob Dylan was really mad with my wife. I had asked by Rolling Stone - the only assignment I ever had for them - to do a story on the Rolling Thunder Review, which was Bob Dylan, Alan Ginsberg, Joan Baez and a host of stars. My wife, some weeks before, had written in The New York Times that The Kid wasn't The Kid anymore and he wasn't all that winning anymore.
A reporter is never put off by somebody not wanting to be interviewed.
Sandra Day O'Connor - once she said that there are - there were no public schools in America until the 18th century, and she overlooked my alma mater because we started - I say we - in 1635. And among the people who went there - and they're on - the walls in the auditorium, the names are: Ralph Waldo Emerson and Cotton Mather, Benjamin Franklin, except he split when he was 10 years old to go to work.
Every life is different; being pro-life is not only about saving the fetus, being pro-life is about all the stages of life.
I told [a big investor in The New Yorker] - I was complaining the way writers complain.I said`[Bill Shawn] pays very well, but a lot of my pieces don't get in,' and that was true of most of the writers there.But he pays you for them, that was very nice of him. This guy didn't think it was very nice. He figured, `Oh, my God, that's more of my investment gone,' and paying money to writers for not printing them. That became, apparently, one of his weapons against Shawn when he - in the corporate skirmishes that went on. It was a bad mistake on my part.
The [George W.] Bush administration would go into court on any kind of a case that they thought might embarrass them and would argue that it was a state secret and the case should not be continued.[Barack] Obama is doing the same thing, even though he promised not to.
We live in the village. We have a summer place in Westport, Connecticut. We don't spend a lot on all kinds of things. But I have no complaints.
A particular moment - and I'm not, to this day, quite sure how I feel about it - I had always wanted to be in the law books - you know, Hentoff vs. something or other.
The people I admire are those who keep on producing and working and going on.
I was co-editor of the magazine called The Jazz Review, which was a pioneering magazine because it was the only magazine, then or now, in which all the articles were written by musicians, by jazz men. They had been laboring for years under the stereotype that they weren't very articulate except when they picked up their horn.
Fortune ought to be a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master.
Duke Ellington had a song, "What Am I Here For?" - this is what being pro-life is.
Abortion happens because of economic circumstances.
Being pro-life is a basic perspective of everything I do.
The need for education for the individual student should be recognized... home, neighborhood. But instead of that, we have the future being determined by standardized testing.
The need for a pro-life point of view undergirds everything you do.
We need to keep trying to rescue the Constitution from the President.
Being pro-life is an essential part of being a writer.
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