Increasingly, editing means going to lunch. It means editing with a credit card, not with a pencil.

You can approach 'The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death' in a variety or combination of ways: as a startlingly eccentric hobby; as a series of unresolved murder mysteries; as the manifestation of one woman's peculiar psychic life; as a lesson in forensics; as a metaphor for the fate of women; as a photographic study.

When December comes, can The Nutcracker be far behind? No, it cant - not in America, anyway.

An editor has to be selfless, and yet has also to be strong-minded.

Beloved Renegade is a meditation on Walt Whitman, on tenderness, on dying.

The man Dickens, whom the world at large thought it knew, stood for all the Victorian virtues - probity, kindness, hard work, sympathy for the down-trodden, the sanctity of domestic life - even as his novels exposed the violence, hypocrisy, greed, and cruelty of the Victorian age.

I have fixed more sentences than most people have read in their lives.