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 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.

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.

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.

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.