The children to whom we read simple stories may or may not show gratitude, but each boon we give strengthens the pillars of the world.

The black kids, the poor white kids, Spanish-speaking kids, and Asian kids in the US - in the face of everything to the contrary, they still bop and bump, shout and go to school somehow. Their optimism gives me hope.

You can practice any virtue erratically, but nothing consistently without courage.

If you're for the right thing, you do it without thinking.

Intelligence always had a pornographic influence on me.

Life loves the liver of it.

We are all creative, but by the time we are three of four years old, someone has knocked the creativity out of us. Some people shut up the kids who start to tell stories. Kids dance in their cribs, but someone will insist they sit still. By the time the creative people are ten or twelve, they want to be like everyone else.