Books gave us a way to shape ourselves - to form our thoughts and to signal to each other who we were and who we wanted to be. They were part of our self-fashioning, no less than our clothes.

My longest love affair: with a book.

I'm not a policy expert - I am only arguing that there is more to an education than an economic ticket.

The best education for a writer, I think, is to read a lot - college can be a good place to do that.

Of course we all know people who aren't cut out for college, but I know it's a mistake to think of education only as a route to a better career. Reading books, studying history - all these things contribute to making us better citizens, too.

Reading is sometimes thought of as a form of escapism, and it’s a common turn of phrase to speak of getting lost in a book. But a book can also be where one finds oneself; and when a reader is grasped and held by a book, reading does not feel like an escape from life so much as it feels like an urgent, crucial dimension of life itself.

I would have thought that one of the things one should learn from college is that nothing is guaranteed. Even if you study something as vocational as accountancy, you still may end up not getting a job as an accountant.