As a country, we can’t teach kids how to read and write when we got 18 years to do it. And that’s – that’s a disgrace.

I would always want printed books.

I took a speed-reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It involves Russia.

Children always turn to the light.

K to 12 is partly about babysitting the kids so the parents can do other things.

I am worrying about my country. I feel I have a responsibility as a novelist to do something.

I had one incident where my daughter said that a girl asked if she was a brown person. I said, ‚We’re black. You have black people, white people, Chinese people, Hispanic people; we’re all brought up differently.‘

The present letter is a very long one, simply because I had no leisure to make it shorter.

Education is important because it prepares you for life.

It is extremely difficult to say how long the process actually took to finally achieve my fragrance, Boudoir, because there was a lot of time waiting around for other people.

The Youth of a Nation are the trustees of posterity.

A wise man can learn more from a foolish question than a fool can learn from a wise answer.

The object is very clear in the fight against racism; you have reasons why you’re opposed to it. But when you’re writing a novel, you don’t want the reader to come out of it voting yes or no to some question. Life is more complicated than that.

It would be an egregious mistake to ever refer to me in the same breath as most of the people I write about.

In the long run, we shape our lives, and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And the choices we make are ultimately our own responsibility.

Do not waste your time on Social Questions. What is the matter with the poor is Poverty; what is the matter with the rich is Uselessness.

Many people listen to what I have to say and I appear a lot in media, so therefore I influence a lot of people and therefore I have a bigger responsibility because I have a bigger platform.

With all of their benefits, and there are many, one of the things I regret about e-books is that they have taken away the necessity of trawling foreign bookshops or the shelves of holiday houses to find something to read. I’ve come across gems and stinkers that way, and both can be fun.

Once I’ve written something it does tend to run away from me. I don’t seem to have any part of it – it’s no longer my piece of writing.

Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.

The learning and knowledge that we have, is, at the most, but little compared with that of which we are ignorant.

I’d rather learn from one bird how to sing than teach 10,000 stars how not to dance.

An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmaster of ever afterwards.

He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches.

When you meet chimps you meet individual personalities. When a baby chimp looks at you it’s just like a human baby. We have a responsibility to them.

The thing I enjoyed most were visits from children. They did not want public office.

I hate victims who respect their executioners.

Education is the leading of human souls to what is best, and making what is best out of them.

I would be a liar, a hypocrite, or a fool – and I’m not any of those – to say that I don’t write for the reader. I do. But for the reader who hears, who really will work at it, going behind what I seem to say. So I write for myself and that reader who will pay the dues.

I am just a child who has never grown up. I still keep asking these ‚how‘ and ‚why‘ questions. Occasionally, I find an answer.

Twitter is great to connect with fans and be transparent. I enjoy that aspect about it. But really, I’m still trying to figure it out.

For me, education has never been simply a policy issue – it’s personal. Neither of my parents and hardly anyone in the neighborhood where I grew up went to college. But thanks to a lot of hard work and plenty of financial aid, I had the opportunity to attend some of the finest universities in this country.

Plan your work for today and every day, then work your plan.

We have language and they do not. Chimps communicate by embracing, patting, looking – all these things. And they have lots of sounds. But they cannot sit and discuss. They cannot teach about things that are not present, as far as we know.

Always do everything you ask of those you command.

I don’t do meetings.

Duty cannot exist without faith.

Alas, after a certain age every man is responsible for his face.

The beginning of an acquaintance whether with persons or things is to get a definite outline of our ignorance.

Youth is a wonderful thing. What a crime to waste it on children.

When I write, I tend to twist my hair. Something for my small mind to do, I guess.

Authority poisons everybody who takes authority on himself.

So many people think of me as a character on TV, but first and foremost, my passion is teaching dance and creating employable, working dancers.

Every utopia – let’s just stick with the literary ones – faces the same problem: What do you do with the people who don’t fit in?

Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence.

I’ve been on a calendar, but I’ve never been on time.

I made my fair share of mistakes.

Some people will never learn anything, for this reason, because they understand everything too soon.

The finest language is mostly made up of simple unimposing words.

You send a boy to school in order to make friends – the right sort.

No one lives long enough to learn everything they need to learn starting from scratch. To be successful, we absolutely, positively have to find people who have already paid the price to learn the things that we need to learn to achieve our goals.

The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter – ‚tis the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning.

It’s when you begin to lie to yourself in a poem in order to simply make a poem, that you fail.

I write for no other purpose than to add to the beauty that now belongs to me. I write a book for no other reason than to add three or four hundred acres to my magnificent estate.

When one has finished building one’s house, one suddenly realizes that in the process one has learned something that one really needed to know in the worst way – before one began.

It is a no-fail, incontrovertible reality: If you get, give. If you learn, teach. You can’t do anything with that except do it.

An author writes a book, and that’s the book at that point. And if the author writes the book again, then somehow something has gone wrong, if you see what I mean.

Parents and teachers, learn to listen, then listen to learn from children.

I think I’ve got my business notions and my sense for that sort of thing from my dad. My dad never had a chance to go to school. He couldn’t read and write. But he was so smart. He was just one of those people that could just make the most of anything and everything that he had to work with.

Writing bores me so.

I do not think much of a man who is not wiser today than he was yesterday.