Quote

My grandfather was from outside of Moscow, and my grandmother, although some of her family were French, was from Odessa. They met as immigrants in New York in the early '20s. My mother's family came over from Ireland generations ago.

I was a foreign correspondent in Berlin in the mid-'90s.

Living in a cultural milieu where the foreign writers most widely available and admired were Russian, I came very late to postwar American writers, and I had great trouble with the canonically exalted white male writers I tried first.

I know Italians and I like them. A lot of my father's best friends were Italians.

Those 40 or 50 national correspondents who had followed Kennedy since the beginning of his electoral exertions into the November days had become more than a press corps - they had become his friends and, some of them, his most devoted admirers.

In terms of the Eastern Europe stories, my family is originally from there; even as a kid, it was the Russian writers I loved most, and I've spent a substantial amount of time there myself, traveling and on research grants.

Most national correspondents will tell you they rely on stringers and researchers and interns and clerks and news assistants.

There is a long dishonourable tradition of western intellectuals who have been duped by Moscow. The list includes Bernard Shaw, the Webbs, H. G. Wells, and Andre Gide.

The most important thing I learned as a foreign correspondent in about 80 countries is that it takes a very shallow knowledge of history to think that there are solutions to most problems.

Many of the novelists I admire never left their hometown. Look at Flannery O'Connor. So many of the great Russians never left Russia. Shakespeare never left England. The list goes on.