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Education was the most important value in our home when I was growing up. People don't always realize that my parents shared a sense of intellectual curiosity and a love of reading and of history.

My parents were always very supportive and accepting. They even shared my curiosity for life, or perhaps I theirs.

By the age of nine or ten, I knew that I loved history and writing. It got hold of me and never turned loose.

My mother was a first-grade teacher, so I credit her with this lifelong intellectual curiosity I have, and love of reading and learning.

I was a very curious person because of my parents. They encouraged me to be as curious about as many things as I wanted.

I think my parents recognised that I'd always wanted to be a writer, and so they didn't think that this was some idle, faddish wish on my part.

My parents were avid readers. Both had ambitions to write that had been abandoned early in life in order to get on with life.

My parents are wonderful, practical, sensible people, and the expectation was that I would study something academic.

Disinterested intellectual curiosity is the life blood of real civilization.

I was always a big reader, mostly because my parents were.