Twelve years ago, if someone attacked me, I wouldn't let them get away with it. I'd take them on. I now perceive my job to include allowing people to vent their rage.

I'm not the type to get ulcers. I give them.

He came to see me a few weeks ago, and I said, 'You're not doing it exactly the way I did it,' ... 'You're talking as though it was the four other boroughs against Manhattan.' ... I said 'There are plenty of middle-class people living in Manhattan.' He changed the tone then, so that it became more of a message about the middle class.

Many an article that I myself penned twenty years ago impresses me now as something quite foreign to myself.

My brain is good, but my body is deteriorating. I probably have another two or three years. Or I can pass tomorrow, but it doesn't make a difference to me.

There's a nastiness out there that wants to harm me with words. These are my enemies - the ideologues, the populists, the columnists who don't like the fact that I take them on toe-to-toe. What I try to do is tell the truth. It's not the coin of the realm in politics.