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.

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 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.

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

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.