I Am Not A Ventriloquist.

I Much Prefer Working With Kids Whose Life Could Be Completely Upended By A Reading Of A Book Over A Weekend. You Give Them A Book To Read - They Go Home And Come Back A Changed Person. And That Is So Much More Interesting And Exciting.

I Began As A Boy With Artistic Talent... As A Visual Artist... I Thought That Was What I'd Become And In My Late Teens Drifted Into Reading Serious Literature.

Boys Like It When You Talk To Them As If They Were Grown Men—at Least He Always Did When He Was A Kid—because They Pretend That’s What They Are Anyhow, Grown-up Men, And They Do It For Their Entire Lives.

And There Are People Who Want To Be Writers Because They Love To Write. And They Care.

We Are Not Buried In History, But Surrounded By It. You Can't Avoid Our Behavior Being Shaped By It, To A Considerable Degree. We Have This Fantasy That We Are Free Of History. This Allows Us Not To See The Circumstances, The Historical Circumstances Of Other People.