So much of contemporary crime fiction is painful to read and obsessed with violence, particularly against women, and I can't read that.

All through graduate school, instead of having a television I read murder mysteries: Hammett, Chandler, Ruth Rendell, P. D. James.

I love music. But I've never owned a TV in my adult life, and I've never lived in a place with a television.

My father read 'The New York Times,' my mother did secretarial work, we had a dog, we had a garden, I had a brother.

The ending is one of my blackest, utterly without hope of any sort.

And off in the far distance, the gold on the wings of the angel atop the bell tower of San Marco flashed in the sun, bathing the entire city in its glistening benediction.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg is the most liberal and illumined of the nine Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court.