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.

I think it’s a terrible mistake to only think in terms of a degree “buying” you something.

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.

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

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.

Being absolutely sure that one is right is part of growing up, and so is realizing, years later, that the truth might be more nuanced.

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.

Middlemarch offers what George Eliot calls, in a wonderfully suggestive turn of phrase, “the home epic”- the momentous, ordinary journey traveled by most of us who have not even thought of aspiring to sainthood. The home epic has its own nostalgia – not for a country left behind but for a childhood landscape lost.

A book may not tell us exactly how to live our own lives, but our own lives can teach us how to read a book.