The laptop brings back a more seamless kind of learning.

Giving the kids a programming environment of any sort, whether it's a tool like Squeak or Scratch or Logo to write programs in a childish way - and I mean that in the most generous sense of the word, that is, playing with and building things - is one of the best ways to learn.

We all learned how to walk and talk by interacting with our environment, with real goals and rewards.

We have to make machines understand what they're doing, or they won't be able to come back and say, 'Why did you do that?'

Every moral teacher or spiritual adviser gives injunctions about how to live wisely and well. But life is so complicated and full of uncertainty that rules seldom tell us quite what to do.

I think that's what's great about being an actress is you get to learn so many different things like that, like learning a little bit of Tibetan here, learning a Southern accent there.

I like learning things, and I like that writing comics is an excuse to look into new stuff and research and learn new things and hopefully put them in books.

More particularly, having a largely German-oriented education has made me very responsive to 19th-century German literature.