Most teachers have little control over school policy or curriculum or choice of texts or special placement of students, but most have a great deal of autonomy inside the classroom. To a degree shared by only a few other occupations, such as police work, public education rests precariously on the skill and virtue of the people at the bottom of the institutional pyramid.

I tell beginning readers to read a lot and write a lot. If you want to write a book, find a subject that's really worth the time and effort you'll put in.

Curing yourself of obsessive compulsive disorder by going to a strip club is pretty strange.

I'm going to a commune in Vermont and will deal with no unit of time shorter than a season.

That's when I feel most alive, he told me once on an airplane, when I'm helping people.

If you had an essentially happy childhood, that tends to dwell with you.

The hardest thing was learning to write. I was 13, and the only writing I had done was for Social Studies. It consisted of copying passages right out of the encyclopedia