“Mythology is studied in the school system because most of us come from it.”

Love is the ultimate giving, an expression of one’s best self.

And that’s it; that’s why I want to teach; that’s the one and only compensation: to make a permanent difference in the life of a child.

People ate bread made of the shells of peas because there was no flour.

Children are the true connoisseurs. What’s precious to them has no price, only value.

Learning is a process of mutual discovery for teacher and pupil. Keep an open mind to their unexpected responses.

I feel no different than I felt at 99, 98 or 97. Just because you live a long time, you get all this attention. Just because you survived? Of course, I survived a lot.

A teacher is frequently the only adult in the pupil’s environment who treats him with respect.

Never mind the cream; it will always rise to the top. It’s the skim milk that needs good teachers.

One of my students had written wistfully of a dream-school that would have “windows with trees in them.

I like the word OLD. Not senior, that’s for proms. Older? Older than whom? ‘Old’ is honorable and ripe

Teachers try to make us feel lower than themselves, maybe because this is because they feel lower than outside people. One teacher told me to get out of the room and never come back, which I did.

My mother, for example, has the pleasant notion that my day consists of nodding graciously to the rustle of starched curtsies and a chorus of respectful voices bidding me good morning.

To the young, cliches seem freshly minted.

You can’t laugh and be angry, you can’t laugh and feel sad, you can’t laugh and feel envious.

I’ll never retire as long as I live—that’s like retiring from life! I’ll never stop writing, teaching, lecturing. If you’re in good health, living is exciting on its own.

The preciousness of every moment is emphasized with every tick of the clock. Isn’t it a magnificent day today?

The whole history of baseball has the quality of mythology.

You have the entire gamut of human experience captured in the mythology of the Yoruba. This is what makes the Yoruba mythology a natural source material for me in my creative endeavours.

I rarely use mythology for its own sake because, as a theatre person, the mythological figures are in fact humanity to the ninth degree and Yoruba mythology in particular has fascination of being one of the most humanised mythologies in the world.

All your Western theologies, the whole mythology of them, are based on the concept of God as a senile delinquent.

Great portrait photographers are great mythologists.

Through the mythology of Einstein, the world blissfully regained the image of knowledge reduced to a formula.

The history of making war with biological weapons begins in mythology, in ancient oral traditions that preserved records of actual events and ideas of the era before the invention of written histories.

I would love to do more science fiction. I always envisioned the Riddick franchise as a continuing mythology, so I always imagined that there would be many other films to follow.