Ballet is like any other art form in that we all start out knowing nothing about it.

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.

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

Classics are constantly being re-imagined and transformed, and the originals are none the worse for it; they endure.

If you are a good editor, your relationship with every writer is different.

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