I mean, when you're tired of book reviews, you're tired of life.

I came from an anxious, overly intense East Coast academic family. That was the way of our tribe.

It's natural for a child to assume that his or her own childhood is unremarkable.

I went to college at Harvard, then did three years of graduate school at Yale. At both places I studied comparative literature. People find it odd that I went to both Harvard and Yale, and I guess it is odd, but that's just what people did where I grew up.

I guess I was raised in a household with a lot of reverence for the physical sanctity of books. You didn't destroy books.

Maybe this was one of those times when being a hero didn’t involve looking particularly brave. It was just doing what you should.

I'm now much more excited about genre distinctions. What I still see breaking down are more the hierarchical arrangements of genres. That is, "There is literary fiction, and then there are lesser genres." I'm much more clear on the idea that literary fiction is itself a genre. It is not above other genres. It is down there in the muck with all the other genres, and it's doing the wonderful things that it does, but to give it a Y-axis, to make it high and low, just seems absurd. I stand by that.