The first time I heard Richard Pryor, I knew he would be a major force in the world of comedy.

I started hustling at 12, my mother hustled ahead of me. I was only allowed to because they knew me.

When I really young yet feeling very old, I offered up a lot of myself to the press; I knew it was good copy.

Because I was newly pregnant, I was sick as a dog, yet I knew all my lines from a year before.

I grew up in a small town in India, but through books I knew the world.

It’s just proper for old people to die. Otherwise, they’d go insane in a world too different from the one they knew.

As president of the American Historical Association, I started a programme to make dissertations into e-books in 1999. Before I knew it, I was involved in other electronic projects. Harvard invited me to become director...