After I became a citizen, I felt freer to say what I thought about this country, both negative and positive. I think I had been, consciously and subconsciously, biting my tongue in the past.

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.

I never wanted to be a pundit.

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.

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.

Television has created a nation of news junkies who tune in every night to get their fix on the world.

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.

Words make another place, a place to escape to with your spirit alone.

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

You learn, just as you learn good manners, how to approach things with a certain amount of diplomacy.

I'm happy to have my own opinion and air it when I think it's necessary.

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.