I was a tomboy as a kid - I was skinny and had cropped hair and was often mistaken for a boy - and up until I was about six, I had my own very fluid ideas of gender in that I believed that, somehow, an individual could choose whether or not s/he wanted to be a boy or a girl.

I love artists. I find them fascinating. To me, there really is a genuine magic in what they do.

I still love it. I love lots of other music, too, and always have, but punk's the soundtrack of my youth. I think you never escape the music you're listening to and seeing when you're seventeen, eighteen, nineteen years old.

I read '1984' at a precocious age, like 8, and when I did the math, I realized that Julia, Winston Smith's lover, was born the same year I was, 1957. I read that book over and over again with the 1960s as a backdrop: anti-war and anti-bomb protests and this general pervasive sense of doom.

Committed teachers know their students' needs better than anyone in the system. Traditionally, however, teachers have little control over the purchase of student materials.

Education is there to help our children negotiate the world and understand the communities they're a part of. We owe it to them to provide them with the best information we can to live their lives happily, safely, and without discrimination.

I was a victim of a stereotype. There were only two of us Negro kids in the whole class, and our English teacher was always stressing the importance of rhythm in poetry. Well, everybody knows - except us - that all Negroes have rhythms, so they elected me class poet.

My parents always made education and school the number one priority. They believed that an education is the best gift you can give to your child.