I would have a workshop attached to every school, and one hour a day given up to the teaching of simple decorative arts. It would be a golden hour to the children.

The object of teaching a child is to enable him to get along without his teacher.

College isn’t in everyone’s hearts. I am living proof, though, that school doesn’t mess up your plans. It gives you more experiences to write about.

The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid; the state of being alone.

Knowledge is a polite word for dead but not buried imagination.

There is only one position for an artist anywhere; and that is upright.

If you’ve found some way to educate yourself about engineering, stocks, or whatever it is, good employers will have some type of exam or interview and see a sample of your work.

Think left and think right and think low and think high. Oh, the thinks you can think up if only you try!

It’s a representation of yourself, and you can express a lot of your creativity with what your wearing.

I wanted to write when I was young, but people said it was impossible. Then my parents locked me in a mental institution – they said I was crazy and would never make a living from writing.

Imagination is a poor matter when it has to part company with understanding.

I wanted to write.

I wanted to get a job being creative, and I did.

Writing for other artists helped me figure out that magic you have to capture to make everyone connect with a song.

A person with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds.

Me not finishing school – in my head, I still have this insecurity when I’m talking to someone educated.

The method of instruction in Scouting is that of creating in the boy the desire to learn for himself.

Write injuries in dust, benefits in marble.

The reason children accept discipline from their parents is because they know their parents love them.

Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education.

We will invest in our people, quality education, job opportunity, family, neighborhood, and yes, a thing we call America.

Why, except as a means of livelihood, a man should desire to act on the stage when he has the whole world to act in, is not clear to me.

To take a few nouns, and a few pronouns, and adverbs and adjectives, and put them together, ball them up, and throw them against the wall to make them bounce. That’s what Norman Mailer did. That’s what James Baldwin did, and Joan Didion did, and that’s what I do – that’s what I mean to do.

When I did have some success, it further emboldens you to be like, ‚No, I’m just going to write what I feel I should write.‘

In poor countries, we still need better ways to measure the effectiveness of the many government workers providing health services. They are the crucial link bringing tools such as vaccines and education to the people who need them most. How well trained are they? Are they showing up to work?

Purity of personal life is the one indispensable condition for building up a sound education.

If you love something – and there are things that I love – you do want more and more and more of it, but that’s not the way to produce good work. So as an author, I need to write what I need to write.

I think people inspire me the most. If I meet a person who is incredibly complex, and all of a sudden, I start thinking in rhymes, that person could be a muse.

Harvard makes mistakes too, you know. Kissinger taught there.

Too much of what is called ‚education‘ is little more than an expensive isolation from reality.

Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.

It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education.

If I could write directly on a typewriter or a computer, I would do it. But keyboards have always intimidated me. I’ve never been able to think clearly with my fingers in that position. A pen is a much more primitive instrument. You feel that the words are coming out of your body and then you dig the words into the page.

Music is this divine thing, the closest that we can get to something divine. It’s like this instinct we all own, and some of us have found a way to hear that music and write it down and share it with people.

Untutored courage is useless in the face of educated bullets.

An artist needn’t be a clergyman or a churchwarden, but he certainly must have a warm heart for his fellow men.

I’ve got incredible support from my wife and family and people around me. I’ve got great people around me who handle anything on the outside, business-wise, who help free me up to create in my job.

Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.

A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.

I’ve never had writer’s block.

What charitable 1 percenters can’t do is assume responsibility – America’s national responsibilities: the care of its sick and its poor, the education of its young, the repair of its failing infrastructure, the repayment of its staggering war debts.

My mother never gave up one me. I messed up in school so much they were sending me home, but my mother sent me right back.

I need drama in my life to keep making music.

I don’t intend to stop making music.

Women tend to be more intuitive, or to admit to being intuitive, and maybe the hard science approach isn’t so attractive. The way that science is taught is very cold. I would never have become a scientist if I had been taught like that.

When I take my kid to school, all the parents stop and stare.

In my school, the brightest boys did math and physics, the less bright did physics and chemistry, and the least bright did biology. I wanted to do math and physics, but my father made me do chemistry because he thought there would be no jobs for mathematicians.

Real art has been… what’s the word? Kidnapped? No, that’s not it. But, OK, kidnapped by business.

The problem isn’t that Johnny can’t read. The problem isn’t even that Johnny can’t think. The problem is that Johnny doesn’t know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling.

My kids are the funniest two human beings there are.

Why should poetry have to make sense?

This man used to go to school with his dog. Then they were separated. His dog graduated!

If you have religious faith, very good, you can add on secular ethics, then religious belief, add on it, very good. But even those people who have no interest about religion, okay, it’s not religion, but you can train through education.

Today, the news is scandals; that is news, but the many children who don’t have food – that’s not news. This is grave. We can’t rest easy while things are this way.

Even the knowledge of my own fallibility cannot keep me from making mistakes. Only when I fall do I get up again.

What I have is a malevolent curiosity. That’s what drives my need to write and what probably leads me to look at things a little askew. I do tend to take a different perspective from most people.

My passion is bringing storylines around and constructing a full body of work rather than just a 16-bar verse.

I started in action, and then I went to comedy school.

Without education, your children can never really meet the challenges they will face. So it’s very important to give children education and explain that they should play a role for their country.

I don’t claim to be knowledgeable about theology. Most of my knowledge comes out of my experience and the lessons in the Bible. Every Sunday I’m home I teach 45 minutes and we boiled them down to one page for the new book, ‚Through the Year with Jimmy Carter.‘

In almost every area of human endeavor, the practice improves over time. That hasn’t been the case for teaching.