Rebecca Mead quotes:

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

What's your favorite book?' is a question that is usually only asked by children and banking identity-verification services--and favorite isn't, anyway, the right word to describe the relationship a reader has with a particularly cherished book. Most serious readers can point to one book that has a place in their life like the one that 'Middlemarch' has in mine.

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.

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.

I think it's a terrible mistake to only think in terms of a degree "buying" you something.

Best qualification for an aspiring journalist is curiosity.

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.

But to demand that a work be "relatable" expresses a different expectation: that the work itself be somehow accommodating to, or reflective of, the experience of the reader or viewer. The reader or viewer remains passive in the face of the book or movie or play: she expects the work to be done for her. If the concept of identification suggested that an individual experiences a work as a mirror in which he might recognize himself, the notion of relatability implies that the work in question serves like a selfie: a flattering confirmation of an individual's solipsism.

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.

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

My longest love affair: with a book.

My master's degree was in journalism, but everything important I ever learned about being a journalist I learned on the job.

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.

While the fashion industry may, at least at the top end, be thriving, the notion of fashion itself is becoming more and more meaningless. Any discipline in fashion has long since evaporated; the idea of a single fashionable skirt length, or heel height, is incomprehensible. The definition of the fashionable has become so skimpy that it refers not to the mode of dress of everyday people--the clothes that have sufficiently caught the popular imagination to be worn in a widespread manner--but only to the styles that momentarily excite members of the fashion caravan.