Top 12 Quotes & Sayings by Michael Silverblatt

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.

I'm often a crier and many things make me cry. I come from a crying family - my mother cries, my grandma used to cry. It was never shameful to cry. My father never told me men don't cry.

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.

The book is an experience that allows you to witness your feelings without having to surrender to them, to succumb to them, or to be battered by them. It gives you access to a deep knowledge of how you would respond to things you would never, thank goodness, have been required to experience.

People tell me I have the best job in the world, which is true, but I also work with some of the best people in the world.

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.

I like to think that at best the interview becomes something like the unaccountable experience of talking to oneself in a mirror.

The art (as opposed to the technology) of reading requires that you develop a beautiful tolerance for incomprehension. The greatest books are the books that you come to understand more deeply with time, with age and with rereading.

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.

She taught you how to be a person who refuses anything but the meaningful.

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.

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.