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.

If every parent understood the huge educational benefits and intense happiness brought about by reading aloud to their children, and if every parent- and every adult caring for a child-read aloud a minimum of three stories a day to the children in our lives, we could probably wipe out illiteracy within one generation.

You experience other cultures to give you a kind of shock that makes you look at your own culture. You appreciate it more as a result of being out of it, but you also realise there are some things lacking in your culture.

Putting babies as young as two weeks into child care for the first year of their life, for 60 hours a week, will cause their brains damage.

As everyone knows, nothing is sweeter than tiny baby fingers and chubby baby toes.

The fire of literacy is created by the emotional sparks between a child, a book, and the person reading.

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.