Endlessly, my father talked to me endlessly about the classics. And he was, you know, he would feed me things and at the time I resented it terribly but for instance he gave me a biography of Oliver Wendell Holmes who was a Supreme Court justice and the one who wrote the famous decision you can’t yell fire in a crowded place. My father was an attorney and he loved constitutional law, so he had both my sister and me read it and then we would discuss it at the dinner table.
And we wanted to talk about clothes or TV and here he would conduct these kind of erudite conversations. But it was, looking back on it now, it was a wonderful thing. And I’ve done it with my own children, you know I would start dinner by reading a poem. Everybody was, I have three boys, they’d moaned and groaned and said you know, we want to talk about our hard drive and I was you know making them discuss a poem.
I think it’s, you know reading is a great way to begin conversation. You don’t’ have to end the conversation by what you’ve read but it starts, it brings your ideas into a different plane, you’re not just talking about what you did that day or what happened that day but it elevates it to, to an idea. Which makes a much more interesting conversation.