I am teaching. Storytelling is teaching.

When I act tough they listen politely till the spasm passes. They know.

There's nothing sillier in the world than a teacher telling you don't do it after you already did it.

To enter a room is to move from one environment to another and that, for the teenager, can be traumatic. There be dragons, daily horrors from acne to zit.

You can't teach in a vacuum. A good teacher relates the material to real life. You understand that, don't you?

Teaching is bringing the news.

Nobody ever told them they had a right to an opinion.

They said her duck recipe and the Chinese music were so dramatic everything else sounded anemic.

We live in a generation of not being in love, and not being together. But we sure make it feel like we're together, because we're scared of seeing each other with somebody else.

The first function of mythology is showing everything as a metaphor to transcendence.

Beautiful, damn hard, increasingly useful. That's fractals.

The arts don't exist in isolation.

If you're an older sibling and you have a younger sibling who needs mentoring or is afraid of the dark, you develop nurturing and empathic skills that you wouldn't otherwise have.

Let us, above all, be clear that, without a convincing program of debt relief to start the new millennium, our objective of halving world poverty by 2015 will be only a pipe dream.

Do we simply stare at what is horrible and forgive it?

People today sometimes get uncomfortable with empirical claims that seem to clash with their political assumptions, often because they haven't given much thought to the connections.

You see, a document has use, whereas art is really useless. Therefore art is never a document, although it can adopt that style.

A woman's wardrobe shouldn't change every six months. You should be able to use the pieces you already own and add to them. Because they are like timeless classics.