Everybody's got one killer story. It doesn't take talent to tell that story, it just takes experience.

Any place that anyone can learn something useful from someone with experience is an educational institution.

We need creativity in order to break free from the temporary structures that have been set up by a particular sequence of experience.

A great deal has been written in recent years about the purported lack of motivation in the children of the Negro ghettos. Little in my experience supports this, yet the phrase has been repeated endlessly, and the blame in almost all cases is placed somewhere outside the classroom.

Though 'Fire and Rain' is very personal, for other people it resonates as a sort of commonly held experience... And that's what happens with me. I write things for personal reasons, and then in some cases it... can be a shared experience.