My dad was a janitor for U.S. Radium Corporation, and he stayed there for 37 years. So he didn't read.

I know what falling off the cliff means. I know from being considered a very bright kid to being considered like a moron and dropping out of school.

I keep threatening to keep a formal journal, but whenever I start one it instantly becomes an exercise in self-consciousness. Instead of a journal I manage to have dozens of notebooks with bits and pieces of stories, poems, and notes. Almost every thing I do has its beginning in a notebook of some sort, usually written on a bus or train.

I'm not out here looking for no garbage cans to curl up in. I'm looking for the same good dreams everybody else is hoping for, but I don't see where they are. Or maybe I see where they are, but I don't see how to get there.

The movie is more real in so many ways than the life I am leading. No, that’s not true. I just desperately wish this was only a movie.

We’re suggesting that [kids are] missing something if they don’t read but, actually, we’re condemning kids to a lesser life. If you had a sick patient, you would not try to entice them to take their medicine. You would tell them, ‘Take this or you’re going to die.’ We need to tell kids flat out: reading is not optional.

Books transmit values. They explore our common humanity. What is the message when some children are not represented in those books?