Thanks to the comic book publishers. Batman and Captain Marvel were responsible for my learning to read at least a year before I showed up at school. They got me interested in writing. Started my first novel at about eight. The title: 'The Canals of ...
I read about violent things. I think what I get out of that is entertainment by learning about different things, and reading the genre and getting an understanding of motivations. But at the end of the day, it's still a book, and I can walk away.
We must educate and train our children to compete and succeed in the 21st century. Our kids are not going to grow up to compete with children in Alabama or Mississippi. They're going to grow up to compete with kids in India, and China, all over the w...
It’s an insult to the scholars’ intelligence. What the teacher is saying should be so interesting that the kids are sitting on the edge of their seat, hanging on every word. It’s intellectual spark that holds and keeps their attention, not baby...
The Gospel of Thomas claims to be the secret sayings of Jesus. There are 114 of them, so it says many things, but the central message is that Jesus is the one who reveals the divine light that brought the universe into being, and that you and I also ...
After Ann Godoff, who was editor-in-chief at Random House, left and went to Viking, I got to know Viking and the people there, and liked them very much. I also found a wonderful editor there, Wendy Wolf. It's a very congenial press.
Once you start to look at the gospels one by one, you realize that followers of Jesus were trying to understand what had happened after he was arrested and killed. They knew Judas had handed him over to the people who arrested him.
Orthodox theologians insisted that the rest of humankind were only transitory creatures, lost in sin - a view that would support what would become their dominant teaching about salvation, offered only through Christ, and, in particular, through the c...
There are some kinds of Christianity that insist you have to believe literally in doctrine. The Gnostic gospels open out the complexity and multiplicity of approaches to this. If you think the story of the virgin birth is mistranslated, for instance,...
Freedom is essentially a condition of inequality, not equality. It recognizes as a fact of nature the structural differences inherent in man — in temperament, character, and capacity — and it respects those differences. We are not alike and no la...
Freedom is essentially a condition of inequality, not equality. It recognizes as a fact of nature the structural differences inherent in man -in temperament, character, and capacity - and it respects those differences. We are not alike and no law can...
It is impossible for us to understand the Church if we regard her as subject to the limitations of human culture. For she is essentially a supernatural organism which transcends human cultures and transforms them to her own ends.
No doubt Western civilization has in the past been full of wars and revolutions, and the national elements in our culture, even when they were ignored, always provided an unconscious driving force of passion and aggressive self-assertion.
The very basic core of a man's living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and di...
A lot of people go off and have fun adventures, or hard adventures, and their impulse is to write about them right away. What really makes a difference is having some perspective on what happened.
It was only when I rounded a bend and glimpsed the white peaks ahead that I doubled my abilities, only when I thought how far i had yet to go that i lost faith that I would get there
You have to know one big thing and stick with it. The leaders who had one very big idea and one very big commitment. This permitted them to create something. Those are the ones who leave a legacy.
Our sense of worth, of well-being, even our sanity depends upon our remembering. But, alas, our sense of worth, our well-being, our sanity also depend upon our forgetting.
Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad's message made a whole lot of people feel whole again, human being again. Some of them came out and found a new meaning to their manhood and their womanhood.
The rise of African nations concurrent with the spread of the Nation of Islam and the civil rights movement gave black America a burst of pride over and above anything they had had since the decline of the movement of Marcus Garvey.
The Europeans not only colonialized most of the world, they began to colonialize information about the world and its people. In order to do this, they had to forget, or pretend to forget, all they had previously known abut the Africans.
