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.

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'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.

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.

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

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.