Education used to be a slice of life, something you did as a child through college, and then spent the rest of your life working, and then death. Everything is about to change. I believe education will become something that fits seamlessly into life, and we will take big clunky things like degrees and college and fit them into a weekend.

I think of it often and imagine the scene clearly. Even if they come to kill me, I will tell them what they are trying to do is wrong, that education is our basic right.

We have never been so rich in books. But there has never been a generation when there is so much twaddle in print for children.

Knowledge of human nature is the beginning and end of political education.

When I was young we weren't even allowed to speak our own languages in school. They called it 'vernacular,' as if only English was the real tongue.

Literature taught me that I wasn't alone, that I could become a writer if I worked at it, that my story mattered. Whether a young reader becomes a writer or not, they deserve to know that their story, whatever it may be, is important.