Robert MacNeil

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.

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.

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

Parents can plant magic in a child’s mind through certain words spoken with some thrilling quality of voice, some uplift of the heart and spirit.

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

I never wanted to be a pundit.

And I’m in favor of that because I have a gay son, who’s a very successful theater designer.

But, finally, I just realized a few years ago that this is where I belonged. I mean everything I had was invested here, emotionally and every other way. And the country had invested enormously in me.

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

Well, I had a small degree, that little infection of skepticism about America which resides in the minds of even America’s closest friends. That America can’t be quite as good as it says it is. And why does it need so relentlessly to keep saying how good it is?

Also, when I didn’t like something, I could keep my opinion to myself.

We spent a month in Japan last year, a week in Istanbul for the United Nations, and nearly three months in my native Nova Scotia, where my two brothers have homes; and we’ll go back there this summer.

I grew up in kind of the last generation of Canadians who thought things that were happening in Britain were more important, almost, than what was happening in Canada. And my mother was fervently of that opinion.

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

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.