"…beautiful thing about writing is it has no real respect for credentialism. You can get various degrees in writing. (…my initial plan was to get MFA.) But a degree can't make you a writer in the way that JD can make you a lawyer.

Great writing comes from all classes people…all kinds of experience. Edith Wharton was raised rich. EL Doctorow was not. 

When I visit schools around country I consistently repeat this—not because I think school is worthless, but b/c, very often, there are kids in audience who are lost, just as I once was. I don't come there to contravene their education…to tell them to drop out. On the contrary, I try to reinforce the ethic of hard work. But they need to know that a grade in a class, is not who they are—and I would say that whether the grade is an A or F. I failed English in HS…then failed British Literature in college. For whatever reason, it simply wasn't my time. But had I taken those grades as an eternal mark, I doubt I would be talking to you now."

"As part of our Bob and Aliecia Woodrick Diversity Learning Center Diversity Lecture Series, Grand Rapids Community College presents Ta-Nehisi Coates speaking on "A Deeper Black: The Meaning of Race in the Age of Obama.""

"The last one is my favorite (so far)—not because it describes my own experience (it doesn’t) or because I agree with it (I don’t quite), but because it’s a great example of someone thinking out loud—working something out in words. And also because it seems to evoke this great line of Lincoln’s, from his Second Inaugural:<br />
<br />
"As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country."<br />
<br />
Yeah, I think that’s actually what I like about Bridle’s post: it seems to be about thrall and how to get out of it. It’s a concept I am always sometimes obsessed with and always sensitive to; there’s a lot of thrall out there and you have to be careful or it seeps into your clothes, your skin.<br />
<br />
I think you can actually finish Lincoln’s line with a lot of different words—industry, company, family—and it stays true."

"In a country where so many gamely adopt the latest new gadget, we need our Thoreaus, not to stop the profusion of technology, but simply to remind us to use them well. There are spaces shot through our massively complex society to find "Simplicity! Simplicity! Simplicity!" by simply deciding to look for it.<br />
<br />
Take another grave and important personality of the time, Abraham Lincoln. His views on technology, delivered in a series of speeches on "Discoveries and Inventions" in the years directly after Thoreau's Walden, were more positive. For Lincoln, technology did not debase humanity, as Thoreau would have contended, but it also wasn't a magical staircase leading to a better world under the label of Progress."