The love of learning, the sequestered nooks, And all the sweet serenity of books.
Were I not a king, I would be a university man.
What I would really like to do is live in a university town and be an intellectual bum. I just want to write, read, whatever. I'm very eclectic. I read every night until my eyes burn.
A man of letters is often a man with two natures,--one a book nature, the other a human nature. These often clash sadly.
Once I engage in something, I really engage in it, and I love the process of reading and researching because I come from an academic background.
When I was a graduate student, the leading spirits at Harvard were interested in the history of ideas.
My father was a doctor, but he was what I would call an intellectual - very well-read and very interested in knowledge. He insisted that I get as much education as my brothers.
Since I come from an educated background, I love to study.
I read science books, chemistry books, history books. I read that stuff for fun.
I had an interest in health policy and a realization that, as an academic physician, one of the things you're always looking to do is to have your clinical interests and your scholarly interests overlap and reinforce one another.
I am a historian. With the exception of being a wife and mother, it is who I am. And there is nothing I take more seriously.
Although reading the classics in Latin in school may be not as fulfilling as it would be at a more mature age, few scientists can afford the time for such diversion later in life.
Our home had many books due principally to the educational interests of my sister and two brothers, all of whom where serious students engaged in professional studies; my sister became a doctor of medicine and my brothers became lawyers.
On graduating from school, a studious young man who would withstand the tedium and monotony of his duties has no choice but to lose himself in some branch of science or literature completely irrelevant to his assignment.
I didn't grow up watching films, as I was more academically inclined.
