Schools provide safe spaces to talk about controversial issues, and literature presents characters portraying human experience in all its richness and contradictoriness.

The elasticity of imagination and compassion is what writing and reading promote.

A novel is not, after all, a historical document, but a way to travel through the human heart.

Literature is about being a complex, contradictory human being.

Every writer can tell you that a book is only truly alive when it finds passionate readers who bring it alive in their imaginations.

Terrence, the Roman slave who freed himself with his writings, once observed, "I am a human being. Nothing human is alien to me." That could be the motto of literature!

Reading and thoughtfulness and openness are the best way, I should think, to begin to address the richness that is in each of us.