“A fourth-grade reader may be a sixth-grade mathematician. The grade is an administrative device which does violence to the nature of the developmental process.”

The Paris Review interview (2010)
Context: Our education system has gone to hell. It’s my idea from now on to stop spending money educating children who are sixteen years old. We should put all that money down into kindergarten. Young children have to be taught how to read and write. If children went into the first grade knowing how to read and write, we’d be set for the future, wouldn’t we? We must not let them go into the fourth and fifth grades not knowing how to read. So we must put out books with educational pictures, or use comics to teach children how to read. When I was five years old, my aunt gave me a copy of a book of wonderful fairy tales called Once Upon a Time, and the first fairy tale in the book is “Beauty and the Beast.” That one story taught me how to read and write because I looked at the picture of that beautiful beast, but I so desperately wanted to read about him too.

April 2004, explaining to the Commons committee on public administration why there are so many different levels of honours Hoggart, Simon. 'Sir Humphrey reveals his Dusty Springfield side' http://politics.guardian.co.uk/redbox/comment/0,9408,1206669,00.html, The Guardian (30 April 2004).

On his childhood relationship with John Mayer
From Outtakes with James Blake, June 23, 2003 issue of ESPN Magazine http://espn.go.com/talent/danpatrick/s/2003/0609/1565617.html

alt. religion. emacs http://groups.google.com/group/alt.religion.emacs/msg/991308e21103bb76

"Bram Cohen: Creator of BitTorrent" http://wrongplanet.net/modules.php?name=Articles&pa=showpage&pid=98, WrongPlanet.net, undated; accessed March 9, 2006, 17:01 (UTC)

Source: Glass Houses

She laughed. “My salary has just jumped from nothing to next-to-nothing. What will I spend it all on?”
Source: Fire with Fire (2013), Chapter 33 (p. 378)

“A Poet’s Own Way”, p. 202
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)