We human beings were never born to read; we invented reading and then had to teach it to every new generation. Each new reader comes to reading with a 'fresh' brain - one that is programmed to speak, see, and think, but not to read.

Fluency is the developmental process that connects decoding with everything we know about words to make the meaning of the text come to life. Fluency is a wonderful bridge to comprehension and to a life-long love of reading.

Literacy is so much entwined in our lives that we often fail to realize that the act of reading is a miracle that is evolving under our fingertips.

The quality of our reading is not only an index of the quality of our thought; it is our best-known route to developing whole new pathways in the cerebral evolution of our species.

We are not only what we read. We are how we read.

After we become literate, we literally 'think differently' about language: images of brain activation between literate and nonliterate humans bear this out.

If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.

In a decaying society, art, if it is truthful, must also reflect decay. And unless it wants to break faith with its social function, art must show the world as changeable. And help to change it.

A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual.

I wanted to start a revolution, using art to build the sort of society I myself envisioned.

We have a responsibility as ex-soldiers to realise we're no longer in the military. All this 'once a soldier, always a soldier', that's all well and good, but that attitude doesn't work in society.

The townspeople outside the reservations had a very superior attitude toward Indians, which was kind of funny, because they weren't very wealthy; they were on the fringes of society themselves.