Everything changes when we read

Give everyone an equal chance

look out through other eyes

"The most important thing that I think fiction does [is that] it lets us look out through other eyes... but it also gives us empathy.  The act of looking out through other eyes tells us something huge and important, which is that other people exist. ... One of the things that fiction can give us is just the realization that behind every pair of eyes, there's somebody like us."

a literate society has no criminality

"It's not one-to-one: you can't say that a literate society has no criminality. But there are very real correlations."

It has to be a conversation

"Literature does not occur in a vacuum. It cannot be a monologue. It has to be a conversation, and new people, new readers, need to be brought into the conversation too."

fiction was an escape from the intolerable