As long as my sixth graders showed an average improvement of five years, the principal and district pretty much left me alone to create my own curriculum and teach whatever I wanted

Power: a currency that never went out of style.

There's a unique bond of trust between readers and authors that I don't believe exists in any other art form; as a reader, I trust a novelist to give me his or her best effort, however flawed.

If everyone could understand the working of a psychopath's mind, we undoubtedly would be closer to insanity ourselves.

If our god's work is to be done in our time, we must do it ourselves.

Once evolution gets a good basic design, it tends to throw away the variants and concentrate on the near-infinite diversity within that design.

Words were like objects, making the idea more solid -- less a poisonous gas and more a ... cube of crystallized thought.