Robert MacNeil Quotations

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

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.

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?

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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 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.

I have children in Denver, Boston and London, England; and my wife and I have been to see all of them; and they to us in New York.

Given the dozens of channels now that are doing something called news, from the serious to the comic, this is the one that has stayed absolutely gimmick-free and, therefore, its uniqueness is more apparent now, I think, than it was when we started 30 years ago,

We have determined to stay in New York City as our permanent home, because it seems to be the most interesting place in which to live as we get older.

It was a way to do something that seemed to be needed journalistically and yet was different from what the commercial network news (programs) were doing,

From my mother came the idea that going down to the sea repaired the spirit. That is where she walked when she was sad or worried or lonely for my father. If she had been crying, she came back composed; if she had left angry with us, she returned in good humor. So we naturally believed that there was a cleansing, purifying effect to be had; that letting the fresh wind blow through you mind and spirits as well as your hair and clothing purged black thoughts; that contemplating the ceaseless motion of the waves calmed a raging spirit.

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.

I never wanted to be a pundit.

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, there - there is - 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.

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

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.