School is a twelve-year jail sentence where bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned.

You need experience, adventure, and explorations more than you need algebra!

Curiosity has no important place in my work, only conformity.

It was never factually true that young people learn to read or do arithmetic primarily by being taught these things. These things are learned, but not really taught at all. Over-teaching interferes with learning, although the few who survive it may well come to imagine it was by an act of teaching.

Creative work and critical thought, which produces new knowledge, can't be conditioned; indeed, conditioning prevents these things from ever happening.

The obligation to amuse and instruct myself was entirely my own, and people who didn't know that were childish people, to be avoided if possible. Certainly not to be trusted.

You either learn your way towards writing your own script in life, or you unwittingly become an actor in someone else's script.