The book is an experience that allows you to witness your feelings without having to surrender to them, to succumb to them, or to be battered by them. It gives you access to a deep knowledge of how you would respond to things you would never, thank goodness, have been required to experience.

I'm very against interviewers who do not have time to read the work, who accept jobs knowing that they don't have time to do the preparation.

People tell me I have the best job in the world, which is true, but I also work with some of the best people in the world.

If I want to have a conversation, I can't have a list of questions, because the second question on the list is going to interrupt the conversation.

A bleak, black book, it engenders awe and despair. I have read it in its entirety 4 1/2 times, each time finding its resonance and beauty so great as to demand another reading. As I read, I found myself devastated by the thoroughness of the book's annihilating sensibility and revived by the beauty of its language, the complexity of its design, the melancholy, horror and stoic sympathy in its rendering of what we used to call the human condition.

I thought I was going to be a math major. My parents were both accountants and wanted me to major in business. Math was our compromise.

A beautiful word in the middle of a sentence can sometimes reduce me to tears in an interview, and when I'm reading, too. I've sometimes wondered whether I'm at the point of tears all the time because I use my eyes so much that they're strained and on the verge of tears anyway.