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.

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.

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.

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.

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