But perhaps there is another, more personal reason for my disagreement with Ramin: I cannot imagine myself feeling at home in a place that is indifferent to what has become my true home, a land with no borders and few restrictions, which I have taken...
Jefferson, who spent his life collecting books, many of which he donated to the Library of Congress, boasted that America was the only country whose farmers read Homer. “A native of America who cannot read or write,” said John Adams, “is as rar...
Between my first book tour, in 2003, and the next one, in 2009, many of the places I visited had undergone a significant transformation or vanished: Cody’s in Berkeley, seven branch libraries in Philadelphia, twelve of the fourteen bookstores in Ha...
correlation between the growing lack of respect for ideas and the imagination and the increasing gap between rich and poor in America, reflected not just in the gulf between the salaries of CEOs and their employees but also in the high cost of educat...
When the founding fathers conceived of this new nation, they understood that the education of its citizens would be essential to the health of their democratic enterprise. Knowledge was not just a luxury; it was essential.
Pragmatists are sometimes more prone to illusion than dreamers; when they fall for something, they fall hard, not knowing how to protect themselves, while we dreamers are more practiced in surviving the disillusionment that follows when we wake up fr...
The crisis besetting America is not just an economic or political crisis; something deeper is wreaking havoc across the land, a mercenary and utilitarian attitude that demonstrates little empathy for people's actual well-being, that dismisses imagina...
[A] great novel will allow you to transcend the social, racial and political limitations imposed by the vicissitudes of life and to find a deep fraternity based on empathy.
So few American novels have happy endings. Perhaps this is not surprising in a nation whose declaration of independence provides its citizens not with the right to happiness, but the right to its pursuit.
Had I been able to formulate my first impressions of the United States, I might have said that there was a place in America called Kansas, where people could find a magic land at the heart of a cyclone.
My impulse now, as then, is to disagree. The majority of people in this country who haunt bookstores, go to readings and book festivals or simply read in the privacy of their homes are not traumatized exiles.
These people,” he had said with his inscrutable smile, “are different from us. They don’t care about books and such things.
The price one pays when choosing exile is the loss of all that defines you as an individual. The only thing that makes this immense loss tolerable is the discovery of a self you did not know existed - of a true independence. That is the real gift of ...
All violence is based on blindness, on a lack of reflection and empathy.
