Too often students are being taught to read as if literature were some kind of ethics class or civics class—or worse, some kind of self-help manual. In fact, the important thing is the way the writer uses the language.

Traditionally, the love of reading has been born and nurtured in high school English class

Fact-checking is so boring compared to writing fiction.

Like most-maybe all- writers, I learned to write by writing and, by example, by reading books.

I can no more reread my own books than I can watch old home movies or look at snapshots of myself as a child. I wind up sitting on the floor, paralyzed by grief and nostalgia.

I waited for dawn, but only because I had forgotten how hard mornings were. For a second I'd be normal. Then came the dim awareness of something off, out of place. Then the truth came crashing down and that was it for the rest of the day. Sunlight was reproof. Shouldn't I feel better than I had in the dead of night.

So perhaps the correct conclusion is that Green was less attuned to how people sound when they speak - the actual words and expressions they employ - than to what they mean. This notion of dialogue as a pure expression of character that...transcends the specifics of time and place may be partly why the conversations in the works of writers such as Austen and Bronte often sound fresh and astonishingly contemporary.