Labels not only free us from the obligation to think creatively; they numb our sensibilities, our power to feel. During the Vietnam War, the phrase body count entered our vocabulary. It is an ambiguous phrase, inorganic, even faintly sporty. It distanced us from the painful reality of corpses, of dead, mutilated people.

When you read to a child, when you put a book in a child's hands, you are bringing that child news of the infinitely varied nature of life. You are an awakener.

The truth came slowly like a story told by people interrupting each other.

A year and a half after the end of the war and the German occupation, Paris was muted and looked bruised and forlorn. Everywhere I went, I sensed the tracks of the wolf that had tried to devour the city. But Paris proved inedible, as it had been ever since its tribal beginnings on an island in the Seine, the Ile de la Cité.

I have a painter's memory. I can remember things from my childhood which were so powerfully imprinted on me, the whole scene comes back.

Literature is the province of imagination, and stories, in whatever guise, are meditations on life.

Teachers inspire the smallest hearts to grow big enough to change the world.