There is only one answer to destructiveness and that is creativity.

I see the mind of the five-year-old as a volcano with two vents: destructiveness and creativeness.

There's no such thing beneath the heavens as conditions favorable to art. Art must crash through or perish.

I flung my tongue round like a cat-o'-nine-tails so that my pleasant peaceful infant room became little less than a German concentration camp as I took out on the children what life should have got.

Not just part of us becomes a teacher. It engages the whole self - the woman or man, wife or husband, mother or father, the lover, scholar or artist in you as well as the teacher earning money.

No other job in the world could possibly dispossess one so completely as this job of teaching. You could stand all day in a laundry, for instance, still in possession of your mind. But this teaching utterly obliterates you. It cuts right into your being: essentially, it takes over your spirit. It drags it out from where it would hide.

It is not so much the content of what one says as the way in which one says it. However important the thing you say, what's the good of it if not heard or, being heard, not felt?