My Mother was a very wild Australian woman. When we were in Africa she could kill a snake with one blow from a crow bar, which she kept at the back door.

The fastest way to teach a child to read is to teach them to write.

I made a lot of friends at school, and they were all Africans. I could have felt very different. I didn't feel different, I didn't notice the color of their skin, I didn't notice the color of my skin and I have remembered that all my life.

I realized with grief that purposeless activities in language arts are probably the burial grounds of language development and that coffins can be found in most classrooms, including mine.

My mother was a very difficult woman to please. She was the sort of woman who thought that if I were praised I would get above myself.

The fire of literacy is created by the emotional sparks between a child, a book, and the person reading. It isn’t achieved by the book alone, nor by the child alone, nor by the adult who’s reading aloud—it’s the relationship winding between all three, bringing them together in easy harmony.

When I say to a parent, "read to a child", I don't want it to sound like medicine. I want it to sound like chocolate.