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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.