Humans like history, like to know why things start and end, like to have reasons for it, and the school never has any reasons.

There had always been kids in school who were smart-that is, the school said they were smart, they could be shown to have been smart at some time in their lives on the schools own tests-but who did not do well in school, who got bad grades and who were a pain in the ass.

We decided that we would teach reading because the kids couldn't read well, and because you had to be able to read in America in order to be equal.

After a couple of days and after a hundred coffees and a thousand cigarettes and a million words and quite a few lunchtime beers we were able to agree that we didn't know nothing.