Latest Nat Hentoff Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• [I wanted] to play the clarinet well so I could be in Duke Ellington's band, but that's now impossible.

  Nat Hentoff

  Play, Band, Dukes

  Source: thedailyhatch.org

• There's a black lawyer in Galveston, Texas, who was the unpaid NAACP general counsel in Texas. He had a great record in housing discrimination, labor discrimination. He decided to take as a client a member of the Ku Klux Klan because the state wanted to get the membership lists of the Klan to find out if they could get something on the Klan. And he said, `I got to take you. I despise you. But we, the NAACP, won that case; NAACP vs. Alabama in the 1950s. Nobody has the right to get your membership lists.' He was fired from the NAACP. To me, he's a hero.

  Nat Hentoff

  Hero, Texas, Ku Klux Klan

  Source: thedailyhatch.org

• I'm working on "Living the Bill of Rights," and it's about people - well, it starts with Brennan and Douglas as people who not only live the Bill of Rights, but try to shape the reason for that.

  Nat Hentoff

  Rights, People, Trying

  Source: thedailyhatch.org

• I had not been very kind to J. Edgar Hoover. And the field agent had written on - it was sent directly to Hoover - that - the director should see this - `And, besides, Hentoff is a lousy writer.' And I thought that went a bit far.

  Nat Hentoff

  Directors, Agents, Fields

  Source: thedailyhatch.org

• They [FBI] had a lot of clippings, a lot of articles I'd written. And to me the - the funniest one was - I had done a piece for Playboy about J. Edgar Hoover.

  Nat Hentoff

  Done, Pieces, J Edgar Hoover

  Source: thedailyhatch.org

• I was writing - at least beginning to write Boston Boy and there were a lot of holes in my so-called research. I didn't know the towns my mother and father came from in Russia. I didn't know the name of the clothing store I went to work for when I was 11 years old. I didn't know a lot of things. So I called for my FBI files, not expecting to have that stuff there, but I wanted to know what they had on me.But they did have the towns my mother and father lived in in Russia. They had the grocery store I worked in when I was 11 years old.

  Nat Hentoff

  Mother, Father, Writing

  Source: thedailyhatch.org

• [Arthur Koestler] wrote some other very interesting books, but that book - I mean, if I were teaching, I don't care what the course is, I would say you really have to read "Darkness at Noon".

  Nat Hentoff

  Book, Teaching, Mean

  Source: thedailyhatch.org

• I know [Arthur Koestler] fought in the Spanish Civil War. He was in prison, I think, in Spain and in Russia. He came to the United States; that's when I saw him in the mid-1940s.

  Nat Hentoff

  War, Thinking, Russia

  Source: thedailyhatch.org

• I went to a lecture of [Arthur Koestler ] once, I never met him.

  Nat Hentoff

  Lectures, Arthur, Mets

  Source: thedailyhatch.org

• Fortunately most of the people who were involved in anti-Vietnam activity did not con themselves into being like the violent people they didn't want.

  Nat Hentoff

  People, Vietnam, Want

  Source: thedailyhatch.org

• I was less angry at [Carl] Armstrong, though I was angry at the people who came to his trial: Dan Ellsberg, who ordinarily I respected a lot; Philip Berrigan; the guy who teaches at Princeton still - I can't remember his name. And they were saying - well, they were saying, really, what Arthur Koestler had people saying on "Darkness at Noon." The means were unfortunate and, sadly, someone died, but the end is what is important and this was a great symbolic - something or other - sign against the war in Vietnam.

  Nat Hentoff

  War, Mean, Names

  Source: thedailyhatch.org

• Carl Armstrong was one of those people in the anti-war years who had been so convinced of the righteousness of their cause that he and some friends decided they would blow up a building at the University of Wisconsin, in which they said research was being done to help the war against the Vietnamese. What they blew up at three or four in the morning was a young scientist, who was married and had a couple of kids, who wasn't working on war stuff at all. And he was killed.

  Nat Hentoff

  Morning, Couple, War

  Source: thedailyhatch.org

• There wasn't much said, but I was thinking, perhaps unkindly - not unkindly,but on - inaccurately of Theodore Dreiser's "Carrie," when the main character in "Carrie" has been brought down by Carrie and his - he - dress is disheveled and all that sort of thing. And that's the last I ever saw of [Will Shawn].

  Nat Hentoff

  Character, Thinking, Dresses

  Source: thedailyhatch.org

• After [Bill Shawn] was fired, I was going to the YMHA [Young Men's Hebrew Association] on the Upper East Side to do a talk on free speech.I went into a coffee shop to get a piece of pie and a coffee, and I was reading a paper and I hear a voice. And it was -it was not a voice I was familiar with, but I looked across the table and I saw Lilian Ross.And sitting next to her was William Shawn - no tie, needed a shave. His voice was kind of coarse and rather loud. He wasn't drunk, but I was just stunned.

  Nat Hentoff

  Reading, Coffee, Men

  Source: thedailyhatch.org

• Lilian Ross was a - veteran writer for The New Yorker. She, in fact, brought me to The New Yorker many years ago.

  Nat Hentoff

  Years, Facts, Veteran

  Source: thedailyhatch.org

• [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.

  Nat Hentoff

  Phones, Bills, Sometimes

  Source: thedailyhatch.org

• 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.

  Nat Hentoff

  Mistake, Nice, Thinking

  Source: thedailyhatch.org

• I've - that I regret. That was stupid and ignorant on my part. I went to a party as a guest of a friend of mine, a lawyer. And he had a client who I didn't know, except - maybe I'm pretending I didn't know, but he was a big investor in The New Yorker. And as I found out later in a book about The New Yorker, this guy was very unhappy about [Bill] Shawn.He thought Shawn was spending out - spending too much money on writers.

  Nat Hentoff

  Regret, Stupid, Party

  Source: thedailyhatch.org

• If [Bill Shawn] liked the piece, then he would run it. But he wanted the magazine to be something that was more than just a weekly event. And as a result you could pick up a New Yorker under him, as I mentioned before, a year from then or 10 years or 20 years and there would always be something worth reading in it.

  Nat Hentoff

  Running, Reading, Years

  Source: thedailyhatch.org

• [Bill Shawn] didn't edit the writers very strongly, but he knew what he wanted.

  Nat Hentoff

  Bills, Wanted, Edits

  Source: thedailyhatch.org

• Inside that quietude there was the firmest of wills. [Bill Shawn] knew exactly what he wanted to do.

  Nat Hentoff

  Bills, Wanted

  Source: thedailyhatch.org

• I've never met anybody quite like [Bill Shawn]. He created - and I'm sure it was conscious - an aura about him of quietude.

  Nat Hentoff

  Bills, Auras, Conscious

  Source: thedailyhatch.org

• After New - when Newhouse bought The New Yorker, he said in one of those grand press conferences that `Bill Shawn will stay here as long as he wants to be here.' Well, he wanted to be here until he died, but he wasn't allowed to.

  Nat Hentoff

  Long, Want, Bills

  Source: thedailyhatch.org

• My chronology is terrible. [Work with William Shawn] must have some ago. It was after he was fired by Newhouse. After New - when Newhouse bought The New Yorker, he said in one of those grand press

  Nat Hentoff

  Chronology, Said, Terrible

  Source: thedailyhatch.org

• I felt better about myself that I did it [calling Max Askeli Commander Askeli], rather than have - rather than thinking it and not writing it for being afraid of what might happen to me.

  Nat Hentoff

  Writing, Thinking, Max

  Source: thedailyhatch.org