I'm often a crier and many things make me cry. I come from a crying family - my mother cries, my grandma used to cry. It was never shameful to cry. My father never told me men don't cry.

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.

In the course of interviewing, I've discovered that if you don't give your guest something to react to, they don't react. They simply say what they've been saying every time they've been interviewed. The last thing you want is to have people say to you what they've said to someone else.

I like to think that at best the interview becomes something like the unaccountable experience of talking to oneself in a mirror.

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.

She taught you how to be a person who refuses anything but the meaningful.

The art (as opposed to the technology) of reading requires that you develop a beautiful tolerance for incomprehension. The greatest books are the books that you come to understand more deeply with time, with age and with rereading.